112 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



If all these assumptions are sound, Dr. Petrie's thesis is established ; if any 

 one of them is false, it falls to the ground. All three were challenged in a 

 valuable paper contributed to our Transactions in 1893 by Dr. J. H. Bernard, 

 now President of the Academy and Archbishop of Dublin. 1 

 Let us examine them one by one. 



1. The first proposition is founded on the passages already quoted from 



the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick and the Life of St. Mac Cairthinn in the 



1 lex Salmanticensis. And the statement which they agree in making, that 



Patrick gave the Domnach to St. Mac Cairthinn, must be admitted to be 



an early tradition. Nevertheless it cannot be true. Petrie himself tells us 



the ornamentation of the inner metal case of the shrine— the Domnach 



proper—" indicates a period between the sixth and twelfth centuries " ;' 



and Mr. Armstrong now expresses the opinion, based on surer ground, that 



the seventh, or even the eighth, century is its earliest possible date. A shrine 



which was constructed in the sixth or any later century cannot have been in 



the hands of St Patrick. 



But Petrie | himself with a way of escape out of this difficulty. 



I!.- t land that the wooden 1">n within the Domnach is earlier 



than its mo.-t ancient parts, and he says plainly that it "may probably be 



al with the manuscript which," according to him, " it was intended to 



N"W it • thai tin- doj _ I for the purpose 



which it has actually fulfilled — to be the core of a metal shrine. For that end 



sliding lid would have been useless ; once the box was encased it could not 



I if it lay nil the rebate provided for it, its projecting 



end would have made it i: .1 to the side over 



the edge "t" which it i ■ . These difficulties have not been satisfactorily 



sun.. y fixing the lid to the front of the shrine; for of necessity both 



it and one "f tie- ends of the box fail to extend completely over the plates 



which tl mi the inch was intended fur the lid has no 



function. It seems, I '- assumption that the box is older 



than the case which Put for the larger assumption, 



that it was already made in the fifth century, these facts give us no ground. 



Indeed, the hypothesis that this rude box, which appears never to have had a 



lid securely I to it, continued for three centuries, or even one century, 



to preserve a book, or relics, or anything else that belonged to St. Patrick, 



and was only after so long a period provided with a protecting cover, is in the 



ijnobable. Put. assume its possibility, what becomes of the 



the Tripartite Life and the Life of S '•' Cairthinn ? One of 



Trantactiom, vol. xix, pp. 303-31:.'. I'. 1.",. Ibid, 



