60 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



with enough of success to make me familiar with the presence of 

 various puzzling devices for obscuring the reading, I had, by no 

 means, arrived at any knowledge of general laws governing the 

 application of these artifices to particular proper names, as Bishop 

 Graves " appears to have done; and I accept the warning against 

 adopting such forms as grammatical case-endings as a piece of new 

 and valuable instruction. 



Assuming, then, that we are rightly guided to a backward reading 

 of the Camp Ogham, by its Latin context, as far as Conuni, it is 

 obvious that the Ogham equivalent completes itself in the characters 

 tt, and thus seems to become, in its turn, a key to the purposes of the 

 inverted t [ j,] in the middle of the epigraph, which now looks as if in- 

 tended to be read not only as a siglum furnishing the prostrate z of 

 fecit, but distributively, as the final letter of both members of the 

 phrase ; in which point of view it will not fail to attract the attention 

 of scholars outside the limited circle of those who interest themselves 

 in Ogham lapidary writing. 



Cununit, I may observe, may be compared with the cunitti of one 

 oftheBurnham group (No. rv.), the duplication of the syllable un 

 being one of the same class of intentional obscurations, exemplified in 

 numerous instances, notably in the Maumanorig legend, which ap- 

 pears to read anmcolololnaililter, seemingly an inversion and pho- 

 netic puzzle for Col/man ailiter, i.e. Colman the Pilgrim. 



It is the singular fate of this Camp legend that, expounded as it is 

 now presented, it still associates itself with the name Curi, of which 

 Conuri may be considered the genitive ; — whether or not the son of 

 Daire will probably continue a subject of differing opinions. 



The satisfaction I experience in being honoured with Bishop 

 Graves' communication is mingled with the regret which a later 

 and less able investigator must experience in finding that he has in- 

 truded on ground already pre-occupied and better explored. But it 

 may possibly conduce to the letting in of still more acceptable 

 additional light if I indicate the directions in which I have hitherto 

 prosecuted my own inquiries. They have led to much comparison, 

 and, as I have told the Academy, to the pursuit as well of many ignes 

 fatui as of some substantial results. These results have for a consi- 

 derable time been defined in my contemplation, as material for essays 



1. On the occurrence of Latin Formulas {see Note 13, 14) ; 



2. of Monograms and Polygrams (19) ; 



3. of literal and syllabic Duplications {supra) ; 



4. of Iterates, or characters serving as terminals and initials (13) ; 



Several examples exist of such exceptional digits intercalated with others of the 

 ordinary kind ; sometimes in the form of minuscules, as at Killeen Cormaic ; some- 

 times in the form of tennes, as in the above example, on the " Coribiri" stone in 

 the Cork Institution, and on one of the Koovesmore legends, deposited in the 

 British Museum ; and sometimes possibly, as would appear from the example in the 

 text, in the form of x in one of its exceptional powers. 



