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of the text are chiefly, though not exclusively, the following.

(1) The standard or primary one published in 1611, “Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie.” Here, however, we are met on the threshold of our researches by the perplexing fact that at least two separate issues bear the date of that year, yet differ from each other in so many minute particulars, that we cannot help raising the question which is the earlier or more authoritative, and consequently the more suitable to be taken as the model to which subsequent reprints ought to be accommodated. On this subject, so interesting to students of the English Bible, much light has recently been thrown by Mr Fry of Bristol, whose materials will be thankfully used by many that feel unable to adopt his conclusions, and might desire a little more scholarlike precision in the method of his investigations1. The two chief issues of 1611 may be respectively represented by a folio now in the British Museum (3050. g. 2), and another in the same Library (3050. g. 1) of which Mr Fry says in a manuscript note “it is every leaf correct, and may be taken as a standard copy of this issue.” There is yet a third class of books, bearing date the same year, containing (some more, some less) sheets of six leaves or twelve pages each, or occasionally only two or four leaves of a sheet, which appear to be reprints of portions of one or the other of the aforenamed issues, the preliminary matter being made up from the folio of 1617 or elsewhere, a circumstance which complicates the question not a little, so that in what we have to say it will be advisable to exclude all considerations respecting these reprinted portions2. This may be done the better, inasmuch as Mr Fry’s researches have discovered only six such leaves in the Pentateuch, five in the Apocrypha, none in the New Testament. These reprints are bound up with and form a complete book with portions of each issue in two other Bibles in the Museum (1276. l. 4 and 3050. g. 3) respectively. The textual differences between the two original issues have been diligently collected in Appendix B, pp. lxxxvi.–xc., from which only very manifest misprints of both books have been excluded; by a careful examination of which collation, in those portions where there are no known reprints, the student can form an independent judgment respecting the internal character of each of them. In preparing the present volume, a Bible belonging to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press (A. 3. 14, wanting sheet A of Title-page, Dedication and part of the Translators’ Preface) has been substituted for the Museum book 3050. g. 2, and for 3050. g. 1 the Oxford reprint of 1833, as being a well-known publication which exactly resembles it in all places consulted, and was itself taken verbatim, with unusual care for insuring accuracy, from a Bible in the Library of the Delegates of the Oxford University Press at that time in actual use. Copies of both issues or recensions of 1611 survive in great numbers in private as well as in public hands, since when the Translation was completed every Church had to be furnished with at least one without delay. Fifteen copies of that which it followed, twelve of the other, are enumerated in the Advertisement which preceded the publication of the Oxford reprint (dated Jan. 14, 1834), and Mr Fry has seen at least seventy, although he seldom gives us information as to where they are severally located3.

The question which of the two recensions is