1889-90.] NINETKENTH MEETING. 29 



land was very remarkable. As to the schools — The Elizabeth Street 

 School was very badly lighted, the desks, too, were placed in a disadvan- 

 tageous position. The large per centage of short-sightedness may also 

 in a measure be due to the character of the dwellings of the children. 

 As to Queen Victoria School, he had never examined any school where 

 the hygienic arrangements were so good, the surroundings, also, were 

 remarkably good, so were those of the Lansdowne School. Perhaps 

 more credit was due to the surroundings than to the schools themselves. 



TWENTIETH MEETING. 



Twentieth Meeting, 29th March, 1890, Mr. VanderSmissen in the chair. 



Donations and Exchanges since last meeting, 62. 



A communication was read from the Chairman and Secretary of the 

 Architectural Section, stating that at the last meeting of that Section its 

 members had resolved for their future success and progress, it would be 

 to their advantage to form the Section into an independent Sketching 

 Club, which rendered it necessary to resign their connection with the 

 Institute. 



Mr. David Spence read a paper on " Ossianic Poetry." 



The paper gave an account of the many collections made in the High- 

 lands at different times of Gaelic poems, ballads, and tales ; with brief 

 sketches of the works of such eminent collectors of fragments of ancient 

 Celtic literature, as McGregor, Dean of Lismore ; Rev. Dr. John Smith, 

 and others. It then proceeded to deal more in detail with the collections 

 made by James Macpherson and by John F. Campbell, of Islay. The 

 progress of the Ossianic controversy was traced, and a brief statement 

 given of the chief arguments of the more prominent contestants. The 

 evidence collected by the Highland Society was reviewed ; and the con- 

 clusion was reached that probably the view of the extremists on neither 

 side was correct ; that Macpherson neither found the poems as they now 

 stand, nor forged them in their entirety ; but that, having collected 

 thousands of lines of Gaelic poetry of undoubted authenticity, he fused 

 them together, himself supplying needed connectives, and in many eases 

 adding passages of his own composition. The groundwork of the poems 

 was held to be certainly of great antiquity ; and the correspondence of 

 the social conditions depicted in them with the real state of society in 

 the third century (the supposed era of the Peine) was stated to be so 



