SECTION IV. 



Sciences, Learning, and Learned Men. 



The native tongue of the Irish people would be the best criterion of 

 i their eariy learning, for " where we find a language masculine and 

 nervous, harmonious in its articulation, copious in its phraseology, 

 and replete with these abstract and technical terms which no civilized 

 people can want, we not only grant that the speakers were once a 

 cultivated and a thinking people, but we must confess that the lan- 

 guage itself is a species of historical inscription, more ancient and 

 more authentic also, as far as it goes, than any precarious hearsay of 

 old foreign writers, strangers in general to the natural as well as civil 

 history of the country they describe."* Should this evidence be here 

 sought, the Irish language will stand the test, and impress the convic- 

 tion of its having been in remotest days the handmaid of science and 

 vehicle of knowledge; and if the fact, of the Phoenicians having colo- 

 nized and subsequently traded with this country, is conceded or esta- 

 blished, " neither is it any wonder, that they should teach the use of 

 letters to the Irish ; the wonder would be on the other hand if they did 

 not;"-f- accordingly the Irish annals say, that what Jason did for 

 Colchis, and Cadmus for Boeotia, the Phoenician Phoenius achieved 

 for the colonists of Ireland. The position is supported by the general 

 belief, that " arts, navigation, and letters, were first taught in Europe 



« Vallancey's Irish Grammar. Pref. f Warner's Ireland, t. 1. p. 73. 



