242 



therefore, it is reinforced by a pair of secondary ribs ; and in 

 fig. 16, the most highly finished of them all, by four such. 

 It is, however, possible that these ribs may have answered 

 another purpose ; they have so strong a resemblance to those 

 on some Malay krises, that they may have been designed, as 

 in those weapons, to retain poison. This practice, I fear, 

 was not unknown among the ancient Irish, as, indeed, it seems 

 to have prevailed among all the Celtic and Iberian races; 

 thus, in the poem on the death of Oscar, published by Bishop 

 Young, in the first volume of our Transactions, the spear of 

 Cairbre is expressly said to be poisoned (Niriie), and nothing 

 seems to require a figurative sense of this epithet to be under- 

 stood. 



" The most obvious hypothesis respecting this curious as- 

 semblage of objects is, that they were the property of some 

 individual, who concealed them in the bog, perhaps on the 

 approach of a predatory party, and perished without recover- 

 ing them. Against this is the fact that the tools and spears 

 seem not to have been ever used, and the probability that, in 

 such times, every spear-head would have been mounted, and 

 in the hand of a combatant. It seems more likely that the 

 collection was the stock of a travelling merchant, who, like 

 the pedlars of modern times, went from house to house, pro- 

 vided with the commodities most in request ; and it is easily 

 imagined that, if entangled in a bog with so heavy a load, a 

 man must relinquish it. And this is connected with another 

 question, the source from which the ancient world was sup- 

 plied with the prodigious quantities of bronze arms and uten- 

 sils which we know to have existed. This caught my imagi-, 

 nation many years since, and I then analysed a great variety 

 of bronzes, with such uniform results, that I supposed this 

 identity of composition was evidence of their all coming from 

 the same manufacturers. Afterwards I found that the pecu- 

 liar properties of the atomic compound already referred to are 

 sufficiently distinct to make any metallurgist, who was en- 



