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248 HISTORY OF THE FRANKS your time complete and undiminished as they were left by us. And bishop of God, whoever you may be, if our Martianus has trained you in the seven disciplines, that is, if he has taught you by means of grammar to read, by dialectic to apprehend the arguments in disputes, by rhetoric to recognize the different meters, by geometry to comprehend the measurement of the earth and of lines, by astrology to contemplate the paths of the heavenly bodies, by arithmetic to understand the parts of numbers, by har- mony to fit the modulated voice to the sweet accents of the verse ; if in all this you are practiced so that my style will seem rude, even so I beg of you do not efface what I have written. But if anything in these books pleases you I do not forbid your writing it in verse provided my work is left safe. I am finishing this work in the twenty-first year after my ordina- tion. Although in what I have just written of the bishops of Tours I have told their years, still this calculation does not agree with the [total] number of years, because I have not been able to learn accurately the length of time between the different ordinations. Now the grand total of years of the world is as follows : From the beginning to the flood 2242 years From the flood to the crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel 1404 years From the crossing of this sea to the resurrection of the Lord 1538 years From the resurrection of the Lord to the death of St. Martin 412 years From the death of St. Martin to the year mentioned above, namely, the twenty-first year after my ordi- nation, which is also the fifth of Gregory, pope of Rome, the thirty-first of king Gunthram, and the nineteenth of Childebert the second 197 years The grand total of which is 5792 years Here Ends in Christ's Name the Tenth Book of the Histories.