February 27. 
Rev. B. LLOYD, D.D., Provost, T.C.D., President, 
in the Chair. 
Mr. Petrie read a paper, being an account of a valuable 
Irish MS. belonging to the Earl of Roden, (of which a 
transcript has been recently made for the Academy, under 
the direction of Mr. Petrie, by Mr. Eugene Curry,) with 
a biographical notice of its author. 
This MS., which is of great celebrity among Irish scho- 
lars and historians, was compiled between the years 1650 
and 1664, by Duald Mac Firbis, from various ancient 
historical works many of which are now lost, and contains 
the most complete historical account of the several tribes 
who made settlements in Ireland and Scotland, with ge- 
nealogies of all the principal families descended from them. 
Its compiler was the last of the hereditary antiquaries of 
Lecan Mac Firbis, in the county of Sligo, by whom the ce- 
lebrated MS. called the Book of Lecan, now in the Library 
of the Academy, was compiled in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries; and it is a valuable supplement to the genealogical 
portion of that great work, the pedigrees being, in most 
instances, continued down to the time of the writer. It also 
contains a vast quantity of matter not to be found in any 
other works, as historical and topographical poems, &c., but 
particularly an account of the Danish and Anglo-Norman 
families, which is of inestimable value. 
The MS. is a small thick quarto on paper, containing 
about 1000 pages, and is wholly in the hand-writing of 
Mac Firbis, with the exception of a small portion in the | 
hand-writing of Michael O’Clery, the chief of the celebrated 
annalists popularly called the Four Masters. The transcript 
made for the Academy agrees in every respect with the ori- 
ginal, with which it has been compared most carefully by 
