written on leaves of birch-bark, fragile with age, easily injured, requiring the utmost caution in handling, and accordingly practically inaccessible except to a very few persons: but other things are not equal; for the transitory advantage of the brilliantly heightened contrast of color which is gained by wetting the birch-bark original, and which passes away as soon as the leaf is dry, is converted into a permanent advantage by the chromophotographic process, in which the plates are made from the freshly wetted original. Moreover, the owner of a facsimile is at liberty to use it at home or wherever he pleases, and to mark it (with pen or pencil) as much as he pleases. The facsimile may therefore truly be said to be in many respects preferable to the original.
Roth's Collation not exhaustive.—Now that the superb facsimile is published, it is possible for a competent critic to test Roth's Collation in respect 1. of its completeness, and 2. of its accuracy. As, first, for its completeness, it is sufficiently apparent from several expressions used by Roth,[1] that he saw plainly that it would be the height of unwisdom to give with completeness the Kashmirian variants as incidental to a work like this one of Whitney's, whose main scope is very much broader. Roth was a man who had a clear sense of the relative value of things—a sense of intellectual perspective; and he was right.
Faults of the birch-bark manuscript.—The birch-bark manuscript is indeed what we may call in Hindu phrase a veritable 'mine of the jewels of false readings and blunders,' an apapāṭhaskhalitaratnākara, a book in which the student may find richly-abounding and most instructive illustrations of perhaps every class of error discussed by the formal treatises on text-criticism. Thus it fairly swarms with cases of haplography (the letters assumed, on the evidence of the Vulgate, to be omitted, are given in brackets): tăṁ tvā çāle sarvavīrās suvīrā [ariṣṭavirā] abhi sañ carema: ihāiva dhruvā prati [ti]ṣṭha çāle, folio 54 b3-4 = iii. 12. 1 c, d, 2 a; vaṣaṭkāre yathā yaçaḥ: [yathā yaças] somapīthe, folio 187 a15-16 = x. 3. 22 b, 21 a; āditye ca [nṛca]kṣasi, folio 187 a17 = x. 3. 18 b; apa stedaṁ[2] vāsamathaṁ gotham uta [ta]skaram, folio 158 b1 = xix. 50. 5 a, b. Confusions as between surd and sonant (cf. p. 749, p. 57) and between aspirate and non-aspirate and between long and short vowels are so common as hardly to be worth reporting: cf. uṣase naṣ pari dhehi sarvān rātrī anākasaḥ, which is found at folio 158 b4 = xix. 50. 7 a, b, and exemplifies all three cases
- ↑ Such are: "Verse, die nur durch Fehler Eckel erregen," p. lxxxii; "On y trouve, il est vrai, de très-bonnes parties, mais d'autres sont tellement défigurées, qu'on a besoin de conjectures sans nombre pour arriver à un texte lisible," Atti, p. 96; "das Kauderwelsch," "ganze Zeilen so unsicher dass man nicht einmal die Wörter trennen kann," p. lxxxvi.
- ↑ To judge from stedam for stenam, we might suppose that the ms. at this point was written down by a scribe at the dictation of a reciter with a bad cold in his head.
