While therefore the greater literalness of later transcription arrested for the most part the progress of the bolder forms of alteration, on the other hand it could perpetuate only what it received. As witnesses to the apostolic text the later texts can be valuable or otherwise only according as their parent texts had or had not passed comparatively unscathed through the earlier times.
12. Again, in books widely read transmission ceases after a while to retain exclusively the form of diverging ramification. Manuscripts are written in which there is an eclectic fusion of the texts of different exemplars, either by the simultaneous use of more than one at the time of transcription, or by the incorporation of various readings noted in the margin of a single exemplar from other copies, or by a scribe's conscious or unconscious recollections of a text differing from that which lies before him. This mixture, as it may be conveniently called, of texts previously independent has taken place on a large scale in the New Testament. Within narrow geographical areas it was doubtless at work from a very early time, and it would naturally extend itself with the increase of communication between distant churches. There is reason to suspect that its greatest activity on a large scale began in the second half of the third century, the interval of peace between Gallienus's edict of toleration and the outbreak of the last persecution. At all events it was in full operation in the fourth century, the time which from various causes exercised the chief influence over the many centuries of comparatively simple transmission that followed.
13. The gain or loss to the intrinsic purity of texts from mixture with other texts is from the nature of the
