63. The results thus obtained supply the foundation for a further process. It is incredible that mixed texts should be mixed only where there are conflate readings. In an overwhelming proportion of cases the composition of two earlier readings would either be impossible or produce an intolerable result; and in all such cases, supposing the causes leading to mixture to be at work, the change due to mixture would consist in a simple replacement of one reading by another, such change being indifferently a substitution or an addition or an omission. Here then we should find not three variants, but two only: that is, the reading of the mixed text would be identical with one of the prior readings; and as a matter of course the documents attesting it would comprise both those that were descended from the mixed text and those that were descended from that earlier text which the mixed text has here followed. When accordingly we find variations exhibiting these phenomena, that is, having one variant supported by that set of documents which habitually attests one recurring factor of mixture in conflate readings, and another supported by all the remaining documents, there is a strong presumption that a large portion of the adverse array of documents is descended from no line of transmission independent of the remaining portion, (that is, independent of the set of documents which habitually attests the other factor of mixture in conflate readings,) but merely echoes at second hand the attestation of that remaining portion of the array: the lines of descent of the two groups which together make up the array are in short not parallel but successive. It follows that the documentary authority for the two variants respectively is virtually reduced to that of
