At the end of the eighteenth century, and particularly at the beginning of the nineteenth, the criteria for managing university library holdings were very different from those that govern us today. Whether due to the obvious constraints of available space or the greater importance placed on having the most up-to-date version of any source, it seems that discarding a manuscript once a printed edition became available was considered acceptable. This appears to have been the case with an autograph by Professor Pascoal José de Melo Freire, as suggested by this annotation: “It is printed in this bookshop, therefore it may be burned.”
We cannot be absolutely certain that 'this bookshop' refers to the university's bookshop itself, yet it does meet the conditions as it holds several editions of the work, dating back to the first edition in 1788. However, we have not encountered any similar notes in other manuscripts in the collection. Could it be that those others were actually burned?