296 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VOL. V. 



Ballymote, which was compiled towards the close of the fourteenth 

 century, and which is now in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, 

 there is a special tract wherein the different styles of Ogamic writing 

 and the value of the letters are explained. Whether Mr. Nicholson 

 received any material assistance from the tract in the Book of Ballymote 

 in his laudable determination to interpret the Pictish inscriptions or not, 

 it is quite manifest that he has brought great ability and acumen and 

 industry to bear in the interpretation of those strange Inscriptions. He 

 has constructed an alphabet in Ogam characters, consisting as it does of 

 " strokes — almost exclusively straight strokes — written in a linecommonly 

 called the stem-line, which is normally straight." Mr. Nicholson is well 

 aware that, as he has not inserted in his book a photograph of every 

 Inscription to which he refers, or of which he gives an interpretation, he 

 cannot expect as ready an appreciation of his labours and as extensive an 

 acquiescence in his deductions on the part of competent scholars, as would 

 undoubtedly be the case, were every intelligent reader of his -book 

 enabled to compare for himself the Ogam Inscriptions with the explana- 

 tion of them which he has been successful in discovering and which he 

 accordingly communicates. He assigns certain reasons which have 

 prevented him from publishing photographs and fac-similes of the 

 Inscriptions which he has undertaken to decipher and explain. It is 

 evident that Professor Rhys, whose scholarship is well-known, is in 

 active sympathy with Mr. Nicholson in a common desire to shed all the 

 light that may be possible for them, on these curious Ogam Inscriptions 

 that connect us in a certain sense with a past which, however interesting 

 it may be for many reasons, has few trustworthy records whereby an 

 acquaintance with its peoples and doings and political circumstances can 

 be obtained by us. It does great credit to Mr. Nicholson that he has 

 studied carefully the best authorities that are -available for understand- 

 ing the few specimens of early Celtic literature which have been trans- 

 mitted to us from the early centuries of the Christian era. He has made 

 himself familiar with Zeuss' Grammatica Celtica and with the Goidelica 

 and other books which Whitely Stokes has edited. There is no 

 exaggeration in the praise which Ebel, the editor of the second edition 

 of the Grammatica Celtica bestows on those two great Celtic scholars : 

 " Post ipsum conditorem ac parentem grammatical Celtica^ baud facile 

 quisquam invenietur, qui melius meritus sit de omnibus hujus doctrinal 

 partibus quam Whitleius Stokes." Mr. Nicholson has conclusively 

 shown that the language of these Pictish Inscriptions is Gaelic, and that 

 so far as the argument which is thus available is concerned, it goes to 

 uphold the theory that the Picts were Gaels, and that their language 

 was Gaelic. He does not overstate the value of his interpretation of the 



