TO PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



offspring, so that she bore no children." A certain 

 Druid, however, promised her offspring if his fee were 

 good enough. On her accepting the terms, he fared 

 with her to the well and there he "sang spells and 

 prophecies over the spring. And he said : * Wash 

 thyself therewith and thou will bring forth a son ; and 

 no child will be less pious than he to his mother's kin 

 to wit, the Connaught-men.' Then the damsel drank 

 a draught out of the well, and with the draught she 

 swallowed a worm, and the worm was in the hand of 

 the boy [sc. whom she thereby conceived] as he lay 

 in his mother's womb, and it pierced the hand and 

 consumed it." The boy was Conall Cernach. 1 As 

 Irish civilisation advanced, however, such incidents 

 were frequently softened into mere dreams. Thus the 

 Irish life of Saint Molasius of Devenish preserved to 

 us in a manuscript written probably from dictation in 

 the sixteenth century presents the holy man's mother as 

 dreaming " that she got seven fragrant apples and the 

 last apple of them that she took into her hand her 

 grasp could not contain it for its size ; gold (as it 

 seemed to her) was not lovelier than the apple." Her 

 husband interprets the dream of " an offspring excellent 

 and famous, with which the mouths of all Ireland shall 

 be filled : " an interpretation justified of course by the 

 saint's birth. We can hardly doubt that as the story 

 was originally told Molasius was the direct result of 

 his mother's eating an apple. The same manuscript 

 indeed contains an account of his blessing a cup of 

 water and giving it to a childless woman to drink with 



1 Nutt, Bran, ii. 74, quoting translation in Whitley Stokes' Irische 

 Texte of an eleventh-twelfth century work. 



