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The possibility that certain folios were removed from the VMs
following the discovery of the manuscript by WMV in 1912 has previously been
considered. A table on page 45 in "The Cipher of Roger Bacon", by William
Romaine Newbold (University Of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1928) describes
the pagination of the VMs divided into five parts as reported in
1928. Everything seems to make sense to me except for a possible
discrepancy (perhaps discussed previously) noticed in Part I, which is listed as
follows:
Leaves Text
Drawings
Missing Total
Part I. Botanical, ff. 1-11, 13-66
65 pp. 5 pp. 125 (f. 12) pp.
2 pp. 132
What interests me here is that f12 is the only leaf listed
as missing. This missing folio leaf is for f11v and f12r. So far so
good. But now I see that leaves 59-64 are included as being
present in the VMS as it was known to Newbold and Grubb. I find this to be
of considerable interest. It appears that these 6 leaves, 12 folios, were
removed sometime between 1928 and when the VMs was donated to the
Beinecke Library by H.P. Kraus. To further strengthen this
observation, we see that 5 pages contain text only. Between ff1-11 and
ff13-66 we know that f1r, f58r, f58v contain text only. We also know
that f57v contains a volvelle which may or may not have been included as a text
page. So it appears that 1 or 2 of the missing folios would contain
text only and 10 or 11 would contain both drawings and text. If these
observations are accurate, then I would surmise that leaves 59-64 might
indeed still be extant, most probably somewhere in Pennsylvania or New
York. Maybe it is time to futher investigate "the usual
suspects".
Regards,
Dana Scott
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