preferred this form, because in the books of the Old Testament he had for the most part been accustomed to the expression of numbers in the masculine gender; for instance, Ezra ii. 13, where the same number is used, as applied to men. Thence Ireneeus more than once says, sexcentos sexaginta sex. The same writer again, when he writes that the same number had been sought for in the Greek names, ETAN0A2, A ATEIN02, TEITAN, shows that s gaxorta egv\- xovrcc eg, in the neuter gender, was read in the Greek : for the numerical value of 666, in the abstract, could not have been sought, by means of names of this kind, in the masculine gender, but only in the neuter. In a census of men, for instance in the fourth book of Moses, which from this circumstance has the title, ’ApiO^uv, of Numbers , and in the book of Ezra, the numbers are put in the mas- culine gender : but when any number is put absolutely, no other gender than the neuter is conveniently employed. Arias Montanus expresses the Greek number in the masculine gender, after the ex- ample of the Complutensians ; the Complutensians thus expressed it on the authority of the Vulgate : for in the Greek MS. which was used by them in other places, and which closely resembles the Codex Seidelianus, it was yfg?, as is plain from the extracts of the Codex Seidelianus, with which a friend supplied me. Many MSS., as I think, retain the neuter gender; and collators may have judged it superfluous to note down their difference from the notation For it was not until the close of his labour that Mill himself quoted the Codex Covelianus as an authority for the reading, egaxotnct egr\ - xovru eg, to which my Apparatus added two others, widely removed from each other, and on that account of sufficient weight.
§ 2. The number 666 is a certain [fixed] one, and is not put for an uncertain one. — We drew this inference a little while ago, in a summary manner, from the very command to calculate. We will hear Joh. March on the same subject. “ Carolus Gallusf he says, u thinks that he has made some important discovery, in believing that the word ‘ mad is put collectively for men, and then, that a number of men signifies a very numerous multitude. But the He- brew phrase, which he adduces by way of proof, is altogether op- posed to his hypothesis. For they (the Hebrews) use the phrase, i men of numbed [Marg. and Hebr. Ezek. xii. 16], for a few , etc. But that opinion appears to be one which ought above all others to be rejected by us, which will have it, that a definite number is here put for an indefinite one, as when 144,000 are given to the Lamb ; and that a great number is then denoted, either of bias-