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Simplicms de Ccelo 589 cius. By the kindness of the President and Fellows of the Society to which it belongs, I have been enabled to make some extracts from it, which I shall lay before the reader in conjunction with the corresponding passages in the Venetian edition of 1526, that he may be enabled to compare the two texts together, and form his own explanation of this literary curiosity. Mons"" Peyron was inclined to think that the spurious text was a retranslation of the Latin version of William de Moerbeke, who was Archbishop of Corinth about 1280 A. D. This version was first published at Venice in 1540, and Mons"" Peyron has certainly proved that there exists a remarkable coincidence between it and the spurious Simplicius ; but his hypothesis leaves one important pheno- menon unexplained, namely, the agreement of the false with the genuine text, in so many instances that it can hardly be doubted that the interpolator must have had access to the original work. My own opinion is, that the interpolated text ought rather to be looked upon as a paraphrase made from the genuine treatise of Simplicius ; that this formed the basis of de Moerbekes translation, and having fallen into the hands of the Venetian printer, was published by him as the original commentary on Aristotle'^s treatise de Coelo. It is certain that paraphrases were very common in the middle ages, especially among the commentators of Aristotle, and Simplicius himself held a sufficiently distinguished rank among the interpreters of that philosopher, to deserve that his work should be made the subject of a similar exercise. The paraphrase in question is not without its value in a critical point of view, as it often leads to the true reading where th^ MSS, of the genuine text are defective. In making the following extracts, my wish has been principally to exhibit those portions of the work of Simpli- cius, which contain passages from writers now lost, especially the fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles, in which the readings of the Corpus MS. are in many instances preferable to those of the Turin copy published by Professor Peyron,