320 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



Mr. Hanrahan here refers to the statement of Mr. Burton, in 

 his letter to General Yallancey, dated 1785, that the letters of the 

 inscription, when first seen by him, were filled up with a yellowish 

 exudation, which he justly considers a proof that they were not then 

 recently engraved. I would, indeed, myself have adduced this state- 

 ment in my first Callan paper amongst the other facts alleged in dis- 

 proof of the supposed lapidary forgery, but that I dreaded exciting a 

 speculation of the stone having been so prepared by some kind of pig- 

 ment for Mr. Burton's inspection. The good common sense of my 

 correspondent convinces me that I was over fastidious, and I add this 

 to the other facts which ought to have admonished those who charged 

 the fabrication of the Ogham text against Lloyd and O'Flanagan of 

 the rashness and injustice of that imputation. 



Mr. Hanrahan further states, in a letter since received : — 



" Mr. Thomas Madigan, living at Carnacalla, two miles west of Kilrush (now 

 about eighty years of age), a good Irish scholar . . . was at my house on the 26th 

 ult., and I showed him your letter, and he told me that he never saw a copy of 

 the poem wanting the stanzas in dispute. He was an intimate friend of Eugene 

 Curry's, and wondered at his assertions. . . . He saw Kennedy's booh, but we 

 do not know what has become of it since it was sold." 



It is hardly necessary to observe, that if the impeached verses 

 existed in Kennedy's book, in or before 1720, O'Flanagan, who was 

 not then born, stands acquitted of the charge of inventing them. This 

 is, indeed, so conclusive of the case that it might reasonably be asked, 

 mi bono the preceding series of arguments and inferences as prefaces 

 to a fact making all argument superfluous? If Kennedy's MS. were 

 before us, and its date verified, it should be confessed that all the 

 earlier part of the present paper is work of supererogation. But, 

 however faithworthy my informant may be, I do not care, in its 

 absence, to dispense with proofs, which, to my mind, carry an indepen- 

 dent and very high degree of conviction. 



Taking it, then, that the verses, although not of high antiquity, 

 were not invented by O'Flanagan, the question remains when, and on 

 what suggestion were they composed or invented, and how came they 

 to appear exclusively in copies of the poem preserved in and emanating 

 from the county of Clare ? The answer will, I think, suggest itself 

 to any one reading the account of the proceedings at the assemblages 

 round Altoir na greine, described in my second Callan paper [supra, 

 p. 265). These proceedings do, primd facie, savour of an origin in 

 the same ages which have transmitted to historic times the traces of 

 Well- worship and of Tree-worship ; so that I think we shall, in a 

 review of the evidence, find ourselves coerced to believe that some 

 tradition, allying itself to the names of Finn, son of Comhal, and his 

 associates, and pointing to events connected with Sun-worship, has 

 existed in popular remembrances in the neighbourhood of Callan 

 mountain, and as a corollary to the ceremonials practised there, for 

 au indefinite time. But, with the proof of the existence of the 

 written tradition, comes the allusion to the points of the compass, 

 which, certainly, is difficult to reconcile with the site of the actual 



