If all the passages of Thucydides in which transposition of words has been plausibly suggested were added up, the total would be by no means insignificant. But careful consideration has convinced me that transposition is required in a far larger number of cases than anyone, so far as I know, has yet thought, and that the transposition is not seldom of a rather surprising kind. Very often it is not a question merely of making a few words which adjoin one another exchange places. A word, two or three words, a clause, a whole sentence has to be moved, sometimes to the line preceding or following, sometimes three or four lines away, occasionally six, eight, or even ten. This is, I am convinced, the true solution of many notorious difficulties in the text of Thucydides. One or two cases of this had struck me years ago. I noted them and thought little of it. But more recently I observed, or thought I observed, quite a number of such cases in Books 4 and 5, and minute study of the other books seems to show that the same thing is true of them also.