Frrcuson— Address delivered before the Academy. 198 
complete in this manner the reproduction of the text of the Books 
of Uidhre, Breac, and Leinster—the last, the property of Trinity Col- 
lege, which noble Institution shared with us the expense of the tran- 
scription and publication. It has been edited by our colleague, Dr. 
Atkinson, whose prefatory survey of the contents reveals the greatest 
storehouse of middle-age Irish literature yet thrown open to scholars. 
Since the death of Mr. O’Longan we have been obliged to abandon 
the pen fae simile, and resort to the slower and more difficult process 
of photography, for the smoke-darkened and much-thumbed vellum of 
the Book of Ballymote, which we hope may be completed in about 
three years. The vellum of the Book of Lecan is comparatively clean, 
and we may look for its reproduction in a shorter time. Others no 
doubt will follow ; and it is not an over-sanguine forecast that, within 
the next ten years, the whole bulk of the old native Irish lterature 
will be in the hands of scholars all over the world. 
But without an adequate Dictionary the progress of students in 
our Middle Irish material must be almost as slow and laborious as we 
may imagine Zeuss’s to have been when he first began the interpreta- 
tion of his glosses. There are at the present time but a very few 
men—their names might be numbered almost on the fingers of one 
hand—to whom the older texts are plenarily intelligible; and that, in 
every instance, only by the help of vocabularies of their own compil- 
ing. The Dictionaries we have are more unsuited for these texts than 
Johnson would be for Chaucer. If the word sought for should happen 
to be there—a rare contingency—it will, in most cases, be found dis- 
guised under an artificial spelling of its first syllable, according to a 
rule of what may be called ‘‘vocalic balance,” devised since the 
language became confined to a section of the populace, and in their 
mouths underwent that process of structural degradation which makes 
the spoken Irish of the present day so ill-defined and slippery in its 
fluency. Whether and to what extent the Dictionary we require 
shall follow these Protean vocalisms, or shall give the words of our 
vellum manuscripts in their original forms, will be a question for the 
Editor to whose hands the preparation of material for the work has 
been confided by Council. A large mass of such material has already 
been accumulated. Windisch at Leipzic, and Zimmer at Berlin, have 
given their aid abroad. At home, the contributions of Dr. Whitley 
Stokes, whether in our Transactions or elsewhere, besides supplying 
examples of perfect English employed in racy and characteristic trans- 
lation, are all enriched with glossaries available for the compilation. 
Eyery Todd lecture delivered here by Professor Hennessy contributes 
supplies of the same kind. Under the direction of the Secretary of 
Council, a process has for a considerable time been in operation of ex- 
tracting every leading word in the old texts hitherto published, with 
enough of its context to verify its several meanings—a great under- 
taking, but not disproportionate to the larger objects we may reasonably 
hope to attain to through its instrumentality. Where we now have a 
few students, painfully making their way through the fac similes, with 
R. I. A. PROC., SER. II., VOL. Il. —POL. LIT. AND ANTIQ. Ve 
