174 The Bishop of Bristol [May 19, 



would put all the vowels together. That has certainly been the 

 work of men who had studied language and the means of expres- 

 sing articulate sounds. Why, we may ask, should men who cer- 

 tainly must have been — I mean no play on the words — men of 

 letters, so far as in those early times any man not of the two great 

 nations of civilisation were, have devised an exceedingly cumbrous 

 manner of writing the language and representing the letters of which 

 they had at least some scientific knowledge ? To say that it was for 

 convenience of cutting on stone or wood is — as I have pointed out — 

 to disregard the facts ; that is to say, a very much more convenient 

 arrangement of the system of notches could have been made. I do 

 not at all mean to imply that those who speak of convenience of 

 cutting suggest that the idea of rapid work was present to the minds 

 of those who devised the Ogam. The world was young then, and 

 people were not striking for so much an hour. But I think the 

 principle of least effort may be taken as having guided, on the whole, 

 the general conduct of men at all times, to their knowledge or not 

 to their knowledge, and the principle of least effort was not present 

 as the fairy godmother at the birth of the Ogam script. 



In connection with the runes and the relative labour of cutting 

 runes and ogams, I once took the trouble to count how many scores 

 you must cut to make the Anglian runes which correspond to the 

 20 ogam symbols. The result is curious. In each set of 5 letters 

 you must cut in ogam the sum of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 scores or notches. In 

 the first of these groups, 15 notches in ogam, b, I, f, s, n, in name, you 

 must cut 15 scores in runes, exactly the same number. For the second 

 group of 5 ogams, that is of 15 notches, you must cut 13 scores in 

 runes. For the third 15, you have no st in runes; without it you 

 cut 14 notches in runes, and with it you cut 15 in ogam. For the 

 last group, 16 in rune and 15 in ogam. That is, it costs you 60 

 notches to cut the ogam bethluisnion straight through, and 58 to cut 

 the corresponding runes less st, or 56 in ogam and 58 in rune omitting 

 st in ogam. Of course this is the merest coincidence, but it has its 

 bearing on the question of least effort expended on the whole alphabet, 

 as contrasted with the question of least effort in individual letters. 

 If we make a distinction between long notches and short ones, the 

 runes take much less effort to cut, for 31 of the 58 notches are short. 

 In the ogam only the vowels are short ; and as the m group are all of 

 them more than twice the ordinary length, the shortness of the vowels 

 is more than compensated for. Indeed, if you take an ogam score for 

 & of 3 inches in length as your normal length for ogams and runes 

 alike, you will have to cut 216 inches of notch and 15 dots to make 

 your ogams, and about 97 inches of notch to make the corresponding 

 runes. The fact that he had carefully to fit together the various 

 notches which form a rune would probably be more trying to an early 

 stone-cutter than a much greater length of straight cutting in ogam 

 would have been. 



I am driven to believe, either that the ogam was invented of set 



