461 
possess a peculiar mellowness, from the action of the causes 
just alluded to. 
These characters, moreover, have plainly been cut with 
a graver, such as is employed at the present day. But no 
traces appear, on genuine antique Irish ornaments, of the 
use of such an instrument. The lines and patterns on them 
seem to have been laboriously scratched with a point rather 
than cut in. The conclusiveness of these reasons is main- 
tained by the judgment of Mr. West, the eminent jeweller, to 
whom Mr. Graves applied for his opinion on the subject. So 
many valuable relics of antiquity have passed through his 
hands, at different times, that his opinion on a point of this 
kind ought to be nearly decisive. 
Mr. Graves further remarked, that the characters said by 
Vallancey to be ‘* Pheenician or Estrangelo,” are neither the 
one nor the other; and, what is more, in the scanty remains of 
Pheenician literature, which have been collected by Gesenius 
and Hammaker, we meet with no such word as Olta, meaning 
a holocaust. As for the word Aesar, which Vallancey pro- 
fesses to find, though somewhat deformed, in the Ogham in- 
scription, Mr. Graves asserts that it does not frequently occur 
in ancient Irish MSS. ; on the contrary, it is so rare that, with 
the aid of the most accomplished Irish scholars, Mr. Graves 
has not yet succeeded in finding a single instance of its use, 
except as it occurs in O’ Reilly’s and Shaw’s Dictionaries. It 
certainly is an Etruscan word, meaning God, and it may have 
found its way into Irish glossaries, though not belonging to 
the Irish language. 
In order to show how unsafe a guide Vallancey is in what 
{ relates to Ogham writing, or, it might be added, in any mat- 
__ ter of Irish archeology or philology, Mr. Graves referred to 
a passage which occurs in the tract on Oghams, preserved in 
the Book of Ballymote. This passage stands thus in the 
_ original (Book of Ballymote, f. 168) : 
