Macalistek — The "firuuides'* Inscription at Killeen Cormac. 231 



others which their answer raises. It is impossible to go fully into the points 

 which will be alluded to, within the limits of a single paper ; I can for the 

 present only draw the outlines and await another opportunity for the filling- 

 in of the details. 



III. 



The first point that I shall refer to is this :1 that some form of the Eoman 

 alphabet, was in use in Ireland from an early time, anterior to the 

 development of the existing manuscript literature. There are several 

 indications pointing to this conclusion. The Gauls of Caesar's time were 

 well acquainted with letters; the chief druidical schools in his time were in 

 Britain : and, as Professor Mac Neill has pointed out in his masterly analysis 

 of the Irish Ogham Inscriptions, published by this Academy, 1 the orthography 

 and accidence of those inscriptions represent a grammatical tradition entirely 

 independent of the tradition established by the Christian Old-Irish literature. 

 Such a tradition cannot possibly have been preserved in the clumsy Ogham 

 script, which is indeed more of a literary accident than anything else ; nor 

 can it have been preserved in the so-called Irish alphabet of the manuscripts, 

 for there are several letters lacking in the Irish alphabet present in the 

 Ogham, and vice versa. The spelling and grammatical forms on the Ogham 

 monuments constrain us to the belief in a certain amount of literary culture 

 before the coming of the Christian missionaries with their new ideas and their 

 new letters. The groundwork of this literary culture was, no doubt, the 

 poems which, according to Caesar, were committed to the memory of the 

 pupils in the druidic schools — most likely Veda-like sacred and semi-magical 

 hymns and formulae of various kinds. There are various side-issues at this 

 point which for the present I reserve, as these would lead me too far away 

 from the inscription under discussion. 



The Ogham character is a cypher, based on some other alphabet. This 

 has long been admitted, and need not here be enlarged upon. It is also 

 admitted that the Eoman is the only alphabet on which it could have been 

 founded. But no one has attempted, I think, to give a reconstruction of the 

 steps which the inventor followed in devising his scheme. 2 This I shall now 

 endeavour to do, as it has a bearing on the question of the form of the Boman 

 alphabet in use in Ireland at the period of the invention of Ogham, 

 whenever that may exactly have been. 



Let us think for a moment what the inventor of Ogham was trying to 



1 Proceedings, vol. xxvii, p. 329. 



3 Except Bishop Graves, who in Hermathena, vol. ii, p. 460, suggests a process in which 

 even he himself expresses no confidence. 



