114 



continent of Europe, a character at all resembling that of the Irish,* 

 greatly supports the claim to a peculiar alphabet having been 

 brought by the first colonists into Ireland ; and this claim is further 

 strengthened by Strabo's evidence, that in his time letters were 

 universally known throughout Spain, though he names the Tur- 

 detani as the most learned people of the Spanish peninsula,-f being 

 possessed of ancient histories and laws written in verse, and paying 

 particular attention to the preservation of their public records. 



These Turdetani were a Phenician colony, and brought with 

 them the letters and the customs of the parent state, which, as 

 Josephus relates, took every precaution for the sacred preservation 

 of its history.:}: Was it from Strabo or Josephus, that in the 

 dark ages the annalists and bards of Ireland, adopted and trans- 

 ferred to Ireland these ideas of public records and public care of 

 them ? Were they not rather brought along with letters, customs, 

 and arts, by the Milesians, the descendants of these very Turdetaui? 

 Can the antiquity of the assertion of these claims, the early ac- 

 quaintance with letters, and the remarkable differences which ex- 

 isted between the customs of the Irish, and of the surrounding na- 

 tions, be in any other way rationally accounted for ? 



Letters, learning, and civilization, could not have been introduced 

 by our early Christian teachers, for there was not time sufficient 

 for the progress made ; they must have found them to a cei tain 

 degree established in the country, and upon them have engrafted 

 the Christian faith, which quickly spread and flourished in a soil so 



" Hutchinson's defence, 40 — Rowland's Mon. Ant — Camden's Ireland — Johnson's History 

 of the English Language — Hist. Armagh, p. 607. Leibnitz in Phil. Survey of the Soutli of 

 Ireland, p. 431. 



t Littleton Hist. Hen. II. Vol. iii. p. 12. or Strabo. lib. III. p. 204, Amstelod. 



t Sir L. Parson's Defence of Irish Hist. 182. 



