For several centuries it was wholly lost sight of, and it was not till the 13th century that it was rediscovered through the agency of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, who translated it into Latin, under the misconception that it was a genuine work of the twelve sons of Jacob, and that the Christian interpolations were a genuine product of Jewish prophecy.

All this lavish condemnation rests on a complete misconception of the case.

But later Jewish exegesis was especially concerned to eliminate everything in the sacred writings that might give rise to misconception with respect to God on the part of the unlearned.

The hypothesis that the Eudemian Ethics, and by consequence the Magna Moralia, are later than Aristotle has arisen from a simple misconception, continued in a Scholium attributed to Aspasius, who lived in the 2nd century A.D.

The researches of the archaeologist are, in short, tending to reconstruct the primitive classical history; and here, as in the Orient, it is evident that historians of the earlier day were constantly blinded by a misconception as to the antiquity of civilization.