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said it would be impossible for any one to speak too highly of 
the value of the immense collection of antiquities presented 
that evening to the Academy by the Commissioners of Public 
Works. By this valuable donation they had acquired a great 
number of specimens quite new to their Museum; and those 
not new were, in many instances, more perfect than what they 
already possessed. In fact it was realizing a vision which he 
had formed in his mind many years ago—that Ireland might 
yet be the depository of the finest collection of Celtic and me- 
dizval remains of any country in the world—and after that 
night he could scarcely entertain a doubt, there being now 
only one European collection which could compete with theirs, 
that his vision would shortly be realized. He might mention 
one fact with regard to the large number of iron articles pre- 
sented on that as well as on former occasions,—that until within 
a few years back there never had been preserved in any col- 
lection an iron antique of any kind. Nothing was known with 
respect to their age ; and the antiquarians of those days, though 
they attached great importance to objects of bronze, gold, and 
silver, treated iron with contempt; the result was, that they 
could learn nothing whatever of the state of society, so far as 
weapons were concerned, when the use of bronze was discon- 
tinued. A discovery, not sufficiently appreciated at the time, 
in one of the Crannoge islands, in the county of Meath, was 
the first circumstance which gave them a notion of the value 
of these things. The iron articles found at Dunshaughlin be- 
ing associated with ornamented antiques, of which the age had 
been previously ascertained, at once supplied them with a clue 
to their own antiquity, and the conclusion then formed had 
since been fully borne out by the collections forwarded by the 
Shannon Commissioners. For a long period, a sword in his 
own collection was the only iron article preserved in any Irish 
museum ; and on one occasion, when he added to it an iron 
hatchet which he believed ancient, he was induced to with- 
draw it by the ridicule it created, and the article was ultimately 
