III. In turning to the different MSS., we find that the age of all
of them confirms in an equally corroborative manner the theory
that Tacitus did not write the Annals. Here let it be noted that
the age of a MS. can easily be discovered; and that, too, in a
variety of ways:--by the formation of the characters, such as the
roundness of the letters; or their largeness or smallness;--the
writing of the final l's; the use of the Gothic s's and the Gothic
j's; the dotting, or no dotting of the i's; the absence or
presence of diphthongs; the length of the lines; the punctuation;
the accentuation; the form or size; the parchment or the paper;
the ink;--or some other mode of detection. Those MSS. need only be
examined which contain either the whole or the concluding books of
the Annals.

Of the seven MSS. in the Vatican, that numbered 1,864, (referred
to by John Frederic Gronovius, and other editors of Tacitus as the
"Farnesian," from its having been transferred from the Farnese
Palace to the Vatican,) is supposed to be the oldest, for it is
believed to be of the fourteenth century; but the vellum on which
it is written is of the sixteenth; so is the vellum of No. 1,422.
No. 1,863 was thought by Justus Lipsius to be almost as old as No.
1,864, to have been of the close of the fourteenth century; but it
is written on vellum of the middle of the fifteenth century.
Nothing can be ascertained, either from its form or the substance
on which it is written, of No. 2,965, but the Bipontine editors
declared its date to be 1449. No. 1,958, which Puteolanus used in
1475, for his edition (containing the concluding books of the
Annals) was copied at Genoa in the year 1448. The two others,
numbered 412 and 1,478, are both written on vellum of the
fifteenth century.