174 



When the numerous Ogham inscriptions so liberally com- 

 municated to Mr. Graves by Captain Larcom and Dr. Petrie 

 were subjected to the method of analysis, of which an account 

 has been already given (p. 70), the first result obtained was 

 the recognition of the group of vowels, a, e, i, o, u ; which 

 discover themselves by their superior readiness to combine with 

 all the remaining letters of the alphabet. 



Having been prepossessed with the notion that the key of 

 the Ogham cipher, given in most Irish grammars, was not 

 the true one, Mr. Graves was surprised to find that the five 

 Ogham characters, which his method showed to be vowels, 

 were the same as those to which the common key assigns 

 these powers. He further noticed that among these five the 

 characters most frequently recurring were the two which, ac- 

 cording to the common key, stand for a and i, the very letters 

 which a complete tabulation of all the Irish passages in the 

 Book of Armagh had shown to be the letters of most frequent 

 recurrence. Here was, at the outset, a decided indication of 

 the correctness of the received key. 



Again, the tabular analysis of the inscriptions manifested 

 the frequent duplication of a frequently occurring character, 

 hitherto supposed to stand for g ; whilst the table founded on 

 the Irish in the Book of Armagh pointed to c as the con- 

 sonant most frequently recurring, and also most commonly 

 doubled. This, so far from being a discrepancy, was taken to 

 be another proof of agreement, since in ancient Irish MSS. 

 the letters c, k, and q are constantly interchanged. For in- 

 stance, the name of Kiaran is often found spelled with an 

 initial c ox q. 



Another fact immediately manifested by the analysis of the 

 inscriptions, was the occurrence on almost every monument 

 of a group which, read according to the old key, would be 

 maqqi or maqi. This was a fresh confirmation of the cor- 

 rectness of that mode of reading; the word "son" being ob- 

 viously one likely to appear on inscribed monuments. Not to 



