234 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



only inscription in Eoman letters in Ireland, simply because it is the only one 

 that by some fortunate accident escaped notice. 



But we have not yet answered the question why the inscription is 

 inverted ; or indeed why the engraver of the inscription having begun in 

 Ogham did not finish in the same character. To answer these questions we 

 must endeavour to reconstruct the most probable means whereby such an 

 inscription was obtained when it happened to be required. I need hardly say 

 that the arts of reading and writing were confined to a veiy small section of 

 the community, and that in the majority of cases recourse would have to be 

 made to one of these privileged and dignified persons when an inscription was 

 to be drawn up. This would be still more necessary, inasmuch as not only 

 were the mere letters generally unknown : but also what I may call the 

 literary language had long parted company with the colloquial dialect, and 

 was almost, if not quite, as distinct from it as Latin is from French. The 

 druid (for if only for convenience we may so call the functionary applied to) 

 would naturally not take the trouble to write himself on the stone : the most 

 he would do would be to give a model, cut on a rod of wood, to a stonecutter, 

 and leave him to copy it on to the stone as well as he could. The stone- 

 cutter being himself in the majority of eases illiterate, it was inevitable that 

 mistakes should occasionally be made. Such mistakes are not infrequent ; 

 scores are wrongly grouped : there is sometimes an excess, sometimes a loss 

 of a score in a letter; and scores that ought to be on one side of the stem- 

 line are sometimes cut on the other, the mistake being more than once 

 carried through a whole inscription, to the confusion and bewilderment of 

 decipherers. 



N v I take it that the carver of the stone of Ovan was just such a 

 blunderer — and, what is worse, a blunderer with original ideas. His literary 

 attainments were precisely those of an Arab servant whom I once had, who 

 knew but little English, and who used to complain that though he knew 

 the English letters he could not understand how they came together to make 

 words. Our stone-cutter knew the- Eoman letters in current use among the 

 literati ; he also knew their equivalents in Ogham. But given a line of 

 writing, he could not see how they came together to make words. That was 

 not his business : his duty was not to read inscriptions, but to copy them by 

 rote from a model supplied. And, incidentally, we must remark in passing 

 that his skill in drawing the Eoman letters shows a practised hand. They 

 are far better cut, on this stone, than they are on the majority of the 

 Christian inscriptions in "Wales, or than the Irish letters on many of the slabs 

 at Clonmacnuis. This was certainly not the only stone, by a very long way, 

 on which our stone-cutter had made Eoman letters in the course of his life. 



