Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. G9 



now extinct and even forgotten. One of the objections brought against the notion of the Irish 

 towers having been fire-temples, namely, that it was not necessary for such a purpose to raise them 

 to so great a height, is abundantly answered by the description given of some of the Pyrea, or fire- 

 temples of the Guebres. Of these, some, we are told, were raised to so high a point as near 1 20 

 feet, the height of the tallest of the Irish Towers ; and an intelligent traveller, in describing the 

 remains of one seen by him near Bagdad, says, ' the annexed sketch will show the resemblance this 

 pillar bears to those ancient columns so common in Ireland.' 



" On the strength of the remarkable resemblance alleged to exist between the pillar- temples near 

 Bhaugulpore and the Round Towers of Ireland, a late ingenious historian does not hesitate to 

 derive the origin of the Irish people from that region ; and that an infusion, at least, of population 

 from that quarter might, at some remote period, have taken place, appears by no means an extra- 

 vagant supposition. The opinion, that Iran and the western parts of Asia were originally the centre 

 from whence population diffused itself to all the regions of the world, seems to be confirmed by the 

 traditional histories of most nations, as well as by the results both of philological and antiquarian 

 enquiries. To the tribes dispersed after the Trojan war, it has been the pride equally both of Celtic 

 and of Teutonic nations to trace back their origin. The Saxon Chronicle derives the earliest inha- 

 bitants of Britain from Armenia ; and the great legislator of the Scandinavians, Odin, is said to 

 have came, with his followers, from the neighbourhood of the Euxine sea. By those who hold that 

 the Celts and Persians were originally the same people, the features of affinity so strongly observable 

 between the Pagan Irish and the Persians will be accounted for without any difficulty. But, incle- 

 pendantly of this hypothesis, the early and long-continued intercourse which Ireland appears to 

 have maintained, through the Phoenicians, with the East, would sufficiently explain the varieties of 

 worship which were imported to her shores, and which became either incorporated with her 

 original creed, or formed new and distinct rallying points of belief. In this manner the adoration 

 of shaped idols was introduced ; displacing, in many parts as we have seen, in the instance of the 

 idol Crom-Cruach that earliest form of superstition which confined its worship to rude erect 

 stones. To the same later ritual belonged also those images of which some fragments have been 

 found in Ireland, described as of black wood, covered and plated with thin gold, and the chased 

 work on them in lines radiated from a centre, as is usual in the images of the sun. There was also ano- 

 ther of these later objects of adoration, called Kerman Kelstach, the favourite idol of the Ultonians, 

 which had for its pedestal, as some say, the golden stone of Clogher, and in which, to judge by the 

 description of it, there were about the same rudiments of shape as in the first Grecian Hernia?. 

 Through the same channel which introduced these and similar innovations, it is by no means 

 improbable that, at a still later period, the pillar- temples of th* Eastern fire-worship might have 

 become known ; and that even from the shores of the Caspian a colony of Guebres might have 

 found their way to Ireland, and there left, as enigmas to posterity, those remarkable monuments to 

 which only the corresponding remains of their own original country can now afford any clue. 



" The connection of sun-worship with the science of astronomy has already been briefly adverted 

 to ; and the four windows, facing the four cardinal points, which are found in the Irish as well as 

 in the Eastern pillar- temples, were alike intended, no doubt, for the purposes of astronomical ob- 

 servation, for determining the equinoctial and solstitial times, and thereby regulating the recur- 



