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Columba's life it was called lona" It is astonishing that any per- 

 son laying claim to the character of a Gaelic scholar, could venture 

 to assert that Hy was the name of the island, before the time of 

 Saint Columb. The most ignorant Irish peasant that ever read 

 Gaelic, could tell this learned L.L. D. that the letter y never had a 

 place in the Gaelic alphabet ; and that it never was used in Gaelic 

 writing until introduced by some ignorant Scottish scribe into their 

 vulgar and corrupted copies of Gaelic poems. This, however, is not 

 the only proof of Doctor Mc Arthur's want of knowledge of even the 

 rudiments of Gaelic writing ; the word colm, which he says was the 

 name of Columba, is a glaring error which no Gaelic scholar could fall 

 into. The name given to that holy man was Colum, which signifies a 

 dove or pigeon ; and though the word Colm is sometimes used in the 

 vulgar Gaelic of North Britain as a term for pigeon, it never was so 

 written when intended to represent the name of Saint Colum or 

 Columba. But, if even there were no error in either of the above 

 mentioned terms, the corrupt orthography of the stanza, taken from 

 an ancient Irish poem, and the incorrect translation of that stanza, 

 with which he concludes his note, would be fully sufficient to prove 

 that Doctor Mc Arthur would not understand one sentence of the 

 genuine poems of Ossian, if they were before him. 



The nonsense which the Doctor talks about Druids turning Cul- 

 dees, (more than 300 years before the name of Culdee was ever 

 written or heard of,) is undeserving of serious notice ; the candour, 

 however, of this writer is worthy of observation. He talks a great 

 deal about that " famous seat of learning," lona, and of its founder 

 Saint Columb ; but he has not the honesty to acknowledge that 

 Columb was an Irishman, who taught Christianity to the Scotch ; 

 that lona was a monastery founded by that Irish saint ; and that all 

 its abbots, jfrom its very foundation to its final dissolution, with the 



