the data furnished by a succession of variations of reading. What we have to do is to note what combinations of documents, large or small, are of frequent recurrence. Wherever we find a considerable number of variations, in which the two or more arrays of documents attesting the two or more variants are identical, we know that at least a considerable amount of the texts of the documents constituting each array must be descended from a common ancestor subsequent to the single universal original, the limitation of ancestry being fixed by the dissent of the other array or arrays. Each larger array may often in like manner be broken up into subordinate arrays, each of which separately is found repeatedly supporting a number of readings rejected by the other documents; and each such separate smaller array must have its own special ancestry. If the text is free from mixture, the larger arrays disclose the earlier divergences of transmission, the smaller arrays the later divergences: in other words, wherever transmission has been independent, the immediate relations of existing documents are exhibited by those variations which isolate the most subordinate combinations of documents, the relationships of the ultimate ancestors of existing documents by those variations in which the combinations of documents are the most comprehensive; not necessarily the most numerous individually, but the most composite.
D. 60—65. Complications of genealogy by mixture
