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XI. 



THE COUNTIES OF IRELAND: AN HISTORICAL SKETCH 

 OF THEIR ORIGIN, CONSTITUTION, AND GRADUAL 

 DELIMITATION. 



By C. LITTON FALKINER, M.A. 



Eead November 29, 1902. 



Not the least of the many merits of that most luminous of nineteenth- 

 century historians, the late John Richard Green, is his insistence on 

 the importance of the relation in which geography stands to history. 

 By geography Mr. Green meant not so much physical as political 

 geography. The dominating influence upon the development of any 

 given race or people of the main physical characteristics of the land in 

 which their lot is cast has long heen understood by historians ; and 

 the effects produced on the history of the world — in modern times, by 

 the insular position of Great Britain, or, in the world of the ancients, 

 by the peninsular position of Greece — are among the commonplaces 

 of historical criticism. What is not so much a commonplace is the 

 extent of the influence exerted upon the domestic history of any 

 community by the accidents of its early local history, and the degree 

 in which archaic conditions of tribal division may survive in the 

 modern organisation. For these divisions often continue for long 

 centuries after their origin has passed into the partial oblivion of 

 unexplained tradition, to mould the shape and form of a more advanced 

 civilization. 



The application of this principle to the case of Ireland is direct 

 and obvious. For the local history of Ireland is, as has been acutely 

 observed, in a special degree, the backbone and foundation of its 

 general history. Owing to what may be described as the inorganic 

 character of the social structure in the Ireland of the Middle Ages, to 

 the absence of a strong central government or settled constitution, 

 capable of giving to the country and the people the impress of its own 

 uniformity, it is almost exclusively to clan or sept history, and to the 

 history of the particular areas with which the septs were associated, 



E. I. A. PROC, VOL. XXIV., SEC. C] [13] 



