OFFICINAL PLANTS 



OGAM 



commissions t'l.-iiiicd li\ duties, tliev are staff 

 or regimental ollieer* ; divided ly rank, General 

 Officers (q.v.), rVld otticvra (q.v.), ami troop or 

 company officers. The last are captains, lieu- 

 tenants, and second-lieutenant*. Warrant officers 

 in the anny ore niastci -gunners (1st mid 'Jd class), 

 bandmasters, schoolmasters, garrison and regi- 

 mental sergeant -majors, suneriiiteiiding clerks, and 

 conductors of the army service ami ordnance store 

 on ii, Non-commissioned officers are described 

 under that heading. 



A'antl Officer* are divided into three clauses : com- 

 missioned, warrant, and subordinate officers. The 

 commissioned officers are admirals, captains, com- 

 manders, lieutenants, sub-lieutenants, cliief warrant 

 officers, paymasters, doctors, engineers, and naval 

 instructors. All officers of the civil branches of the 

 navy, as paymasters, doctors, and engineers, rank 

 relatively with officers of the military branch accord- 

 ing to their standin<' in the service, as, for instance, 

 an inspector-general of hospitals ranks with a rear- 

 admiral, a chief paymaster with a captain, and so 

 on. The warrant officers are the boatswains, 

 gunners, ami carpenters. The third class com- 

 prises midshipmen, naval cadets, clerks, and 

 engineer students ; these officers have neither 

 commissions nor warrants, but are simply appointed 

 by the Admiralty ; they are on probation, and are 

 liable to be summarily removed at any time for 

 such causes as failure to make satisfactory progress 

 in their studies, general inefficiency, &c. lSo officer 

 of the civil branch, no matter how high may be his 

 relative rank, can ever assume any command, so 

 long as an ollicer of the military branch is present. 

 Petty officers are not officers, they are analogous to 

 non-commissioned ollicers in the army; they will be 

 described under their own heading, as they consti- 

 tute a very important body of men in the navy. 



Ollirinal Plants I. at. officitui, 'ashop') are 

 those medicinal plants which have a place in the 

 pharmacopeias of dillerent countries, and which 

 are therefore sold or some of their products or 

 preparation-, of them by apothecaries and drug- 

 gists. The medicinal plants cultivated to any con- 

 -i.|"iable extent are all oflicinal, but many are also 

 otticinal which are not cultivated. 



Offset*. See SntVKViNO. 



Oftrrdingcn. HKIMIH-II VON (circa 1400), one 

 of the most famous Minnesinger (q.v.). 



Ogam. This word is sometimes written Ogham, 

 but it should then be pronounced with a ijh mute, 

 as in moil. MM lii-h, to which the spelling Oiiliinn 

 belongs. In English, however, it is preferable to 

 pronounce the y, and to spell the word Ogam, as in 

 older I ruth ; then there will lie the noun (hjnm ami 

 the adjective ".,,/,., for which we have the sanction 

 of such authorities as Whitley Stokes and Nigrii. 



The term Ogam is associated with Ogma, the 

 champion of the mythic Tuntha IH Diniann i.e. 

 the trilies of the goddess Ihiuu, or Don as she is 

 called in the Mabinogion of the Welsh. Ogina's 

 name Is, letter for letter, the Irish equivalent of 

 Oymiia, the name of the Gaulish divinity quaintly 

 described by l.m-mn as a Celtic Heracles, which 

 meant a Heracles who performed bis feats by dim 

 of eloquence, not by the force of his arms. So 

 the Gauls pictured him leading crowd- of willing 

 captive*, iMiiind to him by minute chains connect- 

 ing their ears with the tip of his tongue. The 

 Irish account or Ogma is not inconsistent with the 

 Gaulish one of (Igmios; for the former, liesides 

 being a warrior and the champion of the Tnatlia 

 De Ilanann, is represents! its eminently skilled in 

 language*; so he is said to have invented two 

 things, a dialect for the learned, ami an alphabet 

 or form of writing. Both arc called Ogam. The 

 Ogam dialect, on which a learned paper by Ui 



Thuriieyscn should lie read in the Jtevue Cdtiyue 

 (vol. vii. p. 30!l 37-4), proves to have been a jargon 

 of artificial and pedantic origin. It is needless to 

 say that the attribution of such an intention to 

 ( Igma can have formed no part of early Irish tradi- 

 tion aU.ut Ogma; and, as there is no reason to 

 sii)i|M)se the Ogam alphaliet to date till late in tlio 

 Unman occupation of Hritain, much the same 

 remark must apply to the invention of that form of 

 writing. It is not hard, however, to see why lioth 

 came in the course of time to lie ascribed to Ogma : 

 he was, like his Gaulish namesake, probablv a hero 

 of words, of speech, ami of eloquence, so tliat any 

 linguistic invention might readily gravitate into 

 association with his name. 



Tutting aside the Ogam dialect, we shall now 

 confine our remarks to the Ogam alphabet, pre- 

 mising that the key to it was never lost in Irish 

 literature, though little attention was devoted to 

 it by scholars till after the discovery of the bi- 

 lingual inscription at St Dogniael's, near Cardigan, 

 in South Wales. Hut in Irish manuscripts the 

 values of the Ogam characters are naturally given 

 us those of the Irish letters in the pronunciation 

 familiar to the writers of those manuscripts ; go 

 when we deal with Ogams, let us say, of the 5th or 

 the 6th century, certain corrections have to I* 

 made in the equivalents. The following is the 

 Oeam alphabet, with the value of each symbol as 

 it lias been ascertained from the most ancient class 

 of the monuments in question : 



I II III Illl Mill * I 

 (k) d t e qu ~I [1 Tfl TTfl flTTT 



/ // /// //" ///// I II III Illl Hill 

 / // /// //// ///// 

 m g ng (/) r a o u e t 



On this let us remark that the continuous line 

 represents the edge of the stone on which the digits 

 are cut. Taking an Ogam stone /'// situ, one most 

 commonly reads upwaids, and the scores are placed 

 on either side of the edge. In some instances the 

 vowels are not mere notches in the edp- of the 

 stone, but scores of nearly the same length as those 

 of the third group, but differing from them in l>eing 

 cut perpendicular to the edge. This would seem 

 to supply a reason for the slanting of the digits of 

 the tlurd group, but that is not supported Tiy the 



st ancient class of inscriptions. Turning to the 



individual characters, the value of h given to the 

 first of them is derived only from Irish tradition, 

 but there is no reason to doubt its accuracy, though 

 the writer has never come upon any good inscnp- 

 tional evidence in point. The same, till lately, 

 might be said of the case of ng, but he has found 



-ML in an ancient inscription for the nasal in 



the borrowed word, \\\y///^ l[l &<<'< 



The case of -//// i one "f some difficulty, as the 

 letter has never been found in an inscription, while 

 Irish tradition ascribes it the value of 2 or st. This, 

 however, does not mean two dillerent accounts of 



the Ogam, as the Irish somcti s treated .: and st 



as equivalents, as, for example, when they wrote 

 ..I, /(, ,sVy./i I/I-HX, and Klislnlirtli for zfin, /i/tliyrtis, 

 n.w\l'.li;tili>lli. It should be explained that it has 

 long been commonly reduced in Irish words to * or 

 JM. Thus all that "Irish tradition respecting this 

 < (yam seems to mean is, that it was z or a certain 

 other sibilant. Now, as to z representing the soft 

 sound eorre|Miinling to the sharp sound of *s, it is 

 not to lie found in Irish from the iltb century down, 

 and it is doubtful whether it existed in the language 

 late enough to claim a place in the Ogam alphabet, 

 We venture to accept the indication afforded by 



Irish tradition, that -- was a sibilant, or let us 



