of information not open to us. For instance, the stream of Irish
history must, for philosophical reasons, be no further traceable
than to that point at which it issues from the enchanted land of
the Tuatha De Danan. At the limit at which the gods appear, men and
history must disappear; while on the other hand, the statement of
Tiherna, that the foundation of Emain Alacha by Kimbay is the first
certain date in Irish history, renders it undesirable to attach
more historical reality of characters, adorning the ages prior to
B.C. 299, than we could to such characters as Romulus in Roman, or
Theseus in Athenian history.

I desire here to record my complete and emphatic dissent from the
opinions advanced by a writer in Hermathena on the subject of the
Ogham inscriptions, and the introduction into this country of the
art of writing. A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a
pre-existing alphabet, the Ogham may or may not have been. I
advance no opinion upon that, but an invention of the Christian
time it most assuredly was not. No sympathetic and careful student
of the Irish bardic literature can possibly come to such a
conclusion. The bardic poems relating to the heroes of the ethnic
times are filled with allusions to Ogham inscriptions on stone, and
contain some references to books of timber; but in my own reading I
have not met with a single passage in that literature alluding to
books of parchment and to rounded letters.

If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by
Christian missionaries, then these characters would be the more
ancient, and Ogham the more modern; books and Roman characters
would be the more poetical, and inscriptions on stone and timber in
the Ogham characters the more prosaic. The bards relating the lives