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MONDAY, JUNE 10, 1861. 
Very Rev. Dean Graves, D.D., President, in the Chair. 
Tue following gentlemen were elected Members of the Academy :— 
George W. Abraham, LL. D., and the Rev. Thaddeus O’ Mahony. 
The Rey. Wittiam Reeves, D. D., read the following paper :-— 
ON AUGUSTIN, AN IRISH WRITER OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY. 
WE are indebted to editorial laxity for the preservation of two very im- 
portant tracts bearing upon the ecclesiastical history of Ireland. Had 
it not been that some old compiler of Venerable Bede’s works was led, 
by a supposed similarity of style or other deceptive indication in Probus’ 
Life of St. Patrick, to mclude it among the biographical pieces of that 
esteemed writer,* and had not John Hervagius been content to commit 
to print the professed works of Bede as he found them thus collected, 
without any attempt to discriminate between what was genuine and what 
was spurious, the literary world would, in all probability, have never 
been made acquainted with the existence of this memoir, nor would 
Colgan have had a source whence to draw the earliest and most curious 
of the lives in his sevenfold illustration of St. Patrick’s history. 
So, likewise, had not the identity of name misled the compiler of 
St. Augustin’s works, it is exceedingly probable that our Irish Augustin, 
whose style and date were so far removed from those of his patristic 
namesake, would long since have been blotted out of the book of remem- 
brance, and our early church literature would have lost the most respec- 
table component in its scanty sum. Certainly the literary reliques of 
the young prophet owe their preservation to their being nominally 
blended with those of the old. 
St. Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, died in the year 430; but another 
ecclesiastic,t a native of Ireland, of the same name, and connected with 
the same province, flourished two centuries later; and the accident which 
afforded to him a supposed identity with his predecessor saved from ob- 
livion the composition of an obscure writer, whose Scotic origin was 
almost certain to insure his literary extinction. 
The third volume of the various editions of St. Augustin’s works, from 
* The ambiguous import of the word probus in a MS. where proper names were not 
distinguished by capitals, probably disguised the author’s name, and led Hervagius to 
print the colophon of the tract thus :—“ Ecce habes, frater Pauline, a me humili probo, 
postulatum nostre fraternitatis indicium.” Bede Opp. tom. iii., col. 334 (Basil. 1563). 
In Abp. Ussher’s copy (Library Trin. Coll. Dubl., S. d. 17) there is a marginal note in 
his own handwriting :—‘‘ Non est hoc Bed opus; sed Probi Hiberni: ut apparet ex 
fine libri secundi.” 
f The Louvain editors prefix to the treatise the title “ Incipit prologus Augustini 
Episcopt in librum de mirabilibus Scripture Sacre.” 
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