44 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



drawing. Now, no instance has been fonnd of the letter K in any 

 inscribed monument having the form here given to it ; whereas, if the 

 top stroke be ascribed to the adjoining L, with which it equally asso- 

 ciates itself, and if the upper member of the proj ection be extended to its 

 real proportions, the result will correspond with a well-known but 

 perplexing character, which, in Romano-British inscriptions, has the 

 force of N, but is found in Franco-Norman legends with the power 

 of K ; and this may have a bearing of some consequence in deter- 

 mining the force to be ascribed to this same character, where it occurs 

 in a hitherto undeciphered connexion in the last line of the principal 

 epigraph on the Newton Stone. Pointing in the same direction, it 

 may be observed that some of the concluding characters have the 

 appearance of runes; and that the Z seems to have been crossed by 

 a horizontal stroke, which would appear to detract from the high 

 antiquity hitherto ascribed to this legend. 



This Kilmalkedar alphabet-stone affords an instructive illustration 

 of the deceptiveness of worn inscriptional characters, and of the illu- 

 sory nature of those semblances of truth, which sometimes spring 

 directly from error, and may be reckoned amongst the most pernicious 

 of her progeny. When Mr. Pelham occupied himself in making 

 drawings of the inscribed stones in the neighbourhood of Dingle, for 

 the Collectanea of Yallancey, he included this alphabet-stone, which 

 then stood in the open, amongst his studies ; but mistaking the per- 

 pendicular lines of the Roman characters for Ogham digits, he intro- 

 duced into the middle of the alphabet a supposititious Ogham legend ; 

 and (so delusive is untruth) these figments and nonentities actually 

 array themselves without any volition of their author, in an order 

 capable, with an almost allowable degree of adjustment, of yielding 

 an intelligible and not inappropriate meaning, 



Laba hui cabha. 

 " The bed of the grandson of Cabba," would be a welcome addition 

 to the limited Oghamic vocabulary, and would not, so much as most 

 other versions of Ogham texts, offend the proprieties of inscriptional 

 language : but the answer to all such speculation is, that the subjec- 

 matter is a mere phantasm and creation of a misconceiving appre- 

 hension. 



Even where opportunities exist for indoor study and the use 

 of varied lights, error cannot in all cases be entirely excluded. The 

 artist who has illustrated that well-digested and useful section of 

 Sir "William Wilde's " Catalogue," devoted to our collection of Ogham- 

 inscribed stones, while successful in the transfer to his pages of one of 

 the examples given, has fallen, in the case of the other, into certain mis- 

 takes of omission. The instance I refer to is the woodcut of the stone, 

 6tone No. 1. in our collection, at p. 136 of the first volume of the " Ca- 

 talogue" of our Museum. Here the paper-mould, besides converting the 

 initial a into m, discloses two crosses of that peculiar kind called in 

 heraldry the Filfot, in which the ends of the several arms of a Greek 



