402 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



of to the left, and hangs over the right-hand branch. The uncouth z of, e.g., 

 foL -ko" (seb, sebee) appears also in the half-uncial Gospels, Brit. Mus. Eo}'al i 

 B vii. It is merely au ugly variety of the type found in all the older Irish 

 majuscule (e.g. the Book of Kells), the Insular type iu which the lower angle 

 of the letter is projected downwards to the left like a spear. Ligatures are 

 very few, and, we may say, confined to the letter e (e.g. " et," " sa<;culum "), 

 .a letter prone to ligature from the earliest times. For example, even the 

 callicrraphic half-uncial of the Basilican Hilary (of 509-510 a.d.j, and even 

 in the middle of a line (on fol. 63''), offers " inteUf^es,'" with only the upper 

 half of the middle e expressed. Both uncial and half-uncial forms of d, n, s 

 appear, but are not utilized for variety in repetitions like " dedit," " non," 

 " missa." 



For the diphthong ae we do not find e with cedilla or loop below to the 

 left (as in the Book of Kells' and the Lindisfame Gospels), but the a is open 

 and very short, in comparison with the c, in such a ligature as " sae<;ulum," 

 where the second stroke of the a is also the lower curve of the e. 



These are the only details which seem to bear on the question of date. 

 And what can be deduced from them ? That the script is earlier than the 

 eighth century ? Well, that is perhaps a fair deduction, for an eighth-centuiy 

 hand would probably ofier some " late symptom " or other. That it is earlier 

 than the seventh centiuy ? Xo, we could hardly venture upon that deduction. 

 Our knowledge of the distinction between seventh- and sisth-century script 

 in Ireland is all too meagre. All we can say is : " There is no known reason 

 to prevent the script of the Cathach from being as old as St. Golumba's 

 time." 



A plate' accompanying this paper (VI. XXXTV) shows a page (f oL 1 29*^) of 

 a sixth-century half-uncial Bobbie MS. already mentioned, G v. 26 in the 

 Bibliot€ca Xazionale, Turin. On another page (fol. 5^) of this MS. the last eight 

 lines are written by the scribe himself in a kind of cursive minuscule (see 

 plate 21 of Cipolla's " Codici Bobbiesi," vol. i). Our page, too, shows at the end 

 of line 5 a slight de%'iation by the scribe from formal half-uncial, the " es " 

 ligature. In the second last line a passage has been omitted by the scribe, 



added. This form seems to have been corrent (an Insular importation ?) at Corbie in the 

 abbacy of Leutchar (c. 750). It is ihe form used in the script "between French half- 

 uncial and minuscule " of St. Petersburg F v. I, C (written for Leutchar) and its twin- MS. 

 (also from Corbie), F v. i, 5 ; also in Berlin lat. theol. F 354, which must have come to 

 Werden monastery (founded c. 800) from the Corbie scriptorium, for its script is quite of 

 the same type as these two. And it appears in other Corbie siss. 



' !Mr. Alfred de Burgh has kindly given me a very full list of the abbreviation-symbols 

 and ligatures of this Ms. 



- This plate is in natural size. 



