The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[pfeaster]

Is that because of some mysterious rule that makes the word 'and' attract the letter 's'?  Not quite.  Here are the counts for the words that occur before the word 'and':
   262 vertues!and
    95 bruised!and
    87 wine!and
    83 liver!and
    79 them!and [...]

This is an interesting case, but let's consider another one.

I just ran some quick statistics on Culpeper's Herbal myself that could surely be improved on with more care and effort but should be at least roughly correct.

The most common final characters of words overall:

[e] 18.6%
[s] 15.7%
[d] 10.5%
[t] 8.7%
[n] 7.3%

That matches the top five you cited.

Meanwhile, the most common final characters of words followed by the word "are":

[s] 36.1% -- over a third
[y] 21.5% -- the first two options cover over half of all cases
[t] 12.7%
[e] 7.8%
[d] 6.1%

In the latter set, the final character [s] is heavily over-represented because it's the plural marker.  By contrast, the final character [y] is due almost wholly to its occurrence in the pronoun "they."

For your "and", the percentage of [s] at end of preceding words is 26.1% -- still higher than average, though not by as much.  This appears to be due largely to several common grammatical structures containing "and": sequences of nouns including plurals ("ponds and ditches"), sequences of verbs in third person singular ("spreads and creeps"), etc. Not as good a story, but also not "just because."
 
Neither your example nor mine shows quite the kind of word profile we actually find around word-break combinations with skewed statistics in the Voynich Manuscript, in my experience. Importantly, I don't recall seeing anything like your "vertues" or my "they" that suggests whole words are driving the patterns as opposed to individual morphological elements -- glyphs, bigrams, and such.

But even if we look just at Culpeper, that 36.1% for [s] before [are] seems to demonstrate that the kind of statistic we're considering here can be meaningful and revealing.