onsidered to need support,
and so we find michi, nichil, occurring quite regularly. The
difficulty of i and y was met by the suppression of the latter; so
that though it sometimes appears unexpectedly, as in hysteria, it is
only treated as i. Between f and ph there was much uncertainty; phas,
phanum, prophanus are well-known forms, or conversely Christofer,
flenbothomari, Flegeton. B and p were often confused, as in babtizare,
plasphemus; and p made its way into such words as ampnis, dampnum,
alumpnus. A triumph of absurd variation is achieved by Alexander
Neckam, who begins a sentence 'Coquinarii quocunt'.

With the increased learning of the Renaissance these varieties
gradually disappear. The printers, too, rendered good service in
promoting uniformity, each firm having its standard orthography for
doubtful cases, as printers do to-day. The use of e for ae is abundant
in the first books printed North of the Alps; but it steadily
diminishes, and by 1500 has almost vanished. In manuscripts, where it
was easy to forget to add the cedilla, the plain e lasts much longer.
There was also confusion in the reverse direction. Well into the
sixteenth century the cedilla is often found wrongly added to words
such as puer, equus, eruditus, epistola; in 1550 the Froben firm was
still regularly printing aedo, aeditio; and in the index to an edition
of Aquinas, Venice, 1593, aenigma and Aegyptus, spelt in this way, are
only to be found under e. Other forms of error persisted long. To the
end of his life Erasmus usually wrote irito, oportunus; in 1524 he
could still use Oratius. The town of Boppard on the Rhine he styles
indifferently Bobardia or Popardia: just as, much later, editors
described the elder Camerarius of Bamberg as Bapenbergensis in 1583,
as Pabepergensis in 1595. As late as 1540 a little book was printed in
Paris to demonstrate that michi and nichil were incorrect.

In such a state of flux we need not wonder that the mediaeval writers
of dictionaries found the alphabetical arrangement not the way of
simplification they had hoped, but rather to be full of pitfalls; nor
again that the men of the Renaissance thought the work of their
predecessors so lamentably inadequate. We shall do better to admire in
both cases the brilliance and constancy which could achieve so much
with such imperfect instruments.

To complete our sketch of the books on which the scholars of the
fifteenth century had to rely we may consider two mor