quality of the letters, of the clauses and decrees to be adjoined to the Apostolic letters, and sometimes about the payment of the remunerations and other contingencies. Their opinion about questions concerning Chancery business was held in the highest estimation by all the Roman tribunals. Pope Paul II suppressed the college; but Pope Sixtus IV (Constitutio 16, "Divina") re-instituted it. He appointed seventy-two abbreviators, of whom twelve were of the upper, or greater, and twenty-two of the lower, or lesser, presidency ("parco"), and thirty-eight examiners on first appearance of letters. They were bound to be in attendance on certain days under penalty of fine, and sign letters and diplomas. Ciampini mentions a decree of the Vice Chancellor by which absentees were mulcted in the loss of their share of the remuneration of the following session of the Chancery. The same Pope also granted many privileges to the College of Abbreviators, but especially to the members of the greater presidency. Pope Pius VII suppressed many of the offices of the Chancery, and so the Tribunal of Correctors and the Abbreviators of the lower presidency disappeared. Of the Tribunal of Correctors, a substitute-corrector alone remains. Bouix (Curia Romana, edit. 1859) chronicled the suppression of the lower presidency and put the number of Abbreviators at that date at eleven. Later the College consisted of seventeen prelates, six substitutes, and one sub-substitute, all of whom, except the prelates, were clerics or laity. Although the duty of Abbreviators was originally to make abstracts and abridgments of the Apostolic letters, diplomas, et cetera, using the legal abbreviations, clauses, and formularies, in course of time, as their office grew in importance they delegated that part of their office to their substitute and confined themselves to overseeing the proper expedition of the Apostolic letters. Prior to 1878, all Apostolic letters and briefs requiring for their validity the leaden seal were engrossed upon rough parchment in Gothic characters or round letters, also called "Gallicum" and commonly "Bollatico", but in Italy "Teutonic", without lines, diphthongs, or marks of punctuation. Bulls engrossed on a different parchment, or in different characters with lines and punctuation marks, or without the accustomed abbreviations, clauses, and formularies, were rejected as spurious. Pope Leo XIII in his Constitutio Universae Eccles. of 29 December 1878 ordained that they should be written henceforth in ordinary Latin characters upon ordinary parchment and that no abbreviations were to be used