174 



JSTorman coins, nor even with modern articles of manufacture. The 

 invariable story of their find is what we might expect if they had been 

 accidentally dropped, at no very distant period, in or near the localities 

 whence they were afterwards unearthed. Thus they have been picked 

 up by labourers, as the plough-share passed over an old untilled field : 

 one was extracted from the uprooted fibres of an aged pear tree ; another 

 obtained on or near the situation of a disused road; two in caves ; one in 

 a potato garden ; others in heaps of rubbish or clay near human dwell- 

 ings — in a word, under circumstances that at once raise a conjecture 

 they cannot possibly be of any extremely ancient date. There also 

 seems to be satisfactory evidence that similar seals have never yet been 

 found in England or on the Continent. 



The peculiar characters on these seals are admittedly of great anti- 

 quity; but this signifies little. It is the common seal- writing employed 

 by the Chinese for centuries, and still seen on their ordinary seals made 

 and used in the present day; somewhat resembling our own black letter, 

 which is practically obsolete, though in daily use for legal writings, 

 deeds, &c. 



Mr. Getty collated the circumstances under which these seals were 

 found in Ireland, and obtained the aid of educated Chinese and scholars 

 in that language, hoping thus to unravel the problem of their importa- 

 tion here, and wide dispersion over the country. Following out his 

 ideas (which appear to present the only reasonable hope of success), I 

 believe their alleged claim to a venerable antiquity can be disproved, 

 though I am still unable to offer any suggestion as to how they reached 

 our shores, or were scattered broadcast through so many counties. 



An inquiry of a similar nature was worked out a few years ago 

 respecting certain Chinese porcelain bottles obtained in Egypt, and 

 asserted to have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs by travellers. 

 Like our porcelain seals, they were supposed to point to a distant era, 

 when Pharaoh's subjects traded with China, and several interesting 

 speculations were based on this slender substructure. There were in 

 all twelve of these bottles discovered. They fortunately presented five 

 different poetic inscriptions that could be deciphered, and Mr. W, H. 

 Medhurst decided they were extracts from the writings of Chinese 

 poets that, at the farthest, lived under dynasties dating from A. D. 700 

 to 1100. The bottles, therefore, might be so old: in all probability 

 they were much more recent ; indeed Mr. Medhurst' s Chinese teacher 

 referred them to the period of the "Ming" dynasty, to which there are 

 good grounds for concluding our porcelain seals also belong. (See 

 " Trans. Chinese Branch of Royal Asiatic Society," part 3, for 1851-2). 



My inquiries in China were for a long time unsuccessful; for in that 

 vast Empire circumstances and objects which are familiar to persons in 

 one district may be quite unknown elsewhere ; thus my correspondents 

 in Hong Kong, Mngpo, nnd Pekin, could give me no aid, and I finally 

 got satisfactory results at Canton. 



In the Catalogue of the Academy's Museum, Sir W. Wilde describes 

 those seals as " cubical portions of white porcelain about five-eighths 



