Ferguson— On tlie Transcription of Ogham Legends. 33 



sions, I examined the stone with all the attention I conlcl bestow; 

 and for the reading which Mr. Shearman communicated to the 

 Academy in May of that year I am jointly responsible. This read- 

 ing ( Ufano Saei Sahattos) offered in the word saei an apparent 

 equivalent to the Druides of the accompanying Roman epigraph, there 

 being, however, a noticeable space between the a and e. The publi- 

 cation of Mr. Shearman's Paper in our Proceedings naturally attracted 

 much attention. It was the first instance of a " bilingual" found in 

 Ireland. It was, as regards the use of the word Druid in its Latin- 

 ized form, a unique example in the inscriptional records of the British 

 islands. It was found associated with a burying-place of very great 

 antiquity, partaking in its ground plan of the characteristics of Pelig- 

 naree at Croghan, of the old cemetery at Usnach, and of other probably 

 Pagan places of sepulture, and containing examples nowhere else to 

 be found of the doorposts of passages to ancient sepulchral chambers, 

 grooved for the reception of the enclosing stones, and still in situ. 

 These attractions induced a party of gentlemen, of whom Dr. Robert 

 Smith was one and I another, to visit Killeen Cormaic in the autumn 

 of 1865. Dr. Smith, who owns the hand of a craftsman in other 

 work besides surgery, brought with him the means of taking a cast 

 of the "Druid" stone in plaster of Paris, and kindly offered to pre- 

 serve the moulds until some fit occasion should arise for presenting 

 a cast from them to the Academy. Time passed, and it was not until 

 some three years afterwards that I found leisure and opportunity to 

 get the moulds put into the hands of an artist in plaster work. They 

 had suffered some injury in the meantime, so that the upper part of the 



distributively applicable. The intercalated minuscules may thus have a part in the 

 reading; and, in analogy to what Professor Stephens has called the "elegant" 

 employment of a Rune branching to the right, instead of one branching to the left, 

 and vice versa — a practice certainly in use by the more pretentious Rune-smiths — ■ 

 the hh of sahhattos may be an antithetical bb = sabbattos. In this view we would 

 have the equivalents of 



(Unius) ~\ 



(Alteriusi / . 



(Tertii) ^Sagiquies. 



(Quarti) J 



If the principle of antithetical were carried unto the left hand groups, and the 

 first minuscules held good for d — but this is assuming a great deal — the long 

 sought Duftac would emerge as one of the four wise men of Killeen Cormaic, 

 or, as I learn from further researches of Mr. Shearman, of Killeen O'Lugair, 

 which appears to have been the name of the place down to the 13th century. Let 

 not the minuscules be hastily disregarded. There are Ogham digits as slight on other 

 pillar-stones in the same cemetery. Consult Mr. Atkinson's valuable note on 

 different modes and degrees of incision in Mr. Brash's account of the Coribiri 

 (query = Coirbre ?) inscription at the Cork Institution, in " Historical and Archaeo- 

 logical Journal of Ireland," vol. i., 3rd series, p. 256. An arbitrary use of antithe- 

 tic als would be destructive of any definite reading ; and, so far, I am not aware of 

 any clue to their use further than that, in Runes, they appear to be employed only in 

 common formulas (Stephens' " Mon. Run.," 884, &c), where the obvious meaning 

 necessarily detects the inversion. 



