THE KING'S MIRROR 107 



in the native speech. It is quite an extensive lake and 

 has this property, that if you take a stick of the wood 

 that some call holm and others holly but is called acri- 

 folium * in Latin and fix it in the lake so that part of it 

 is in the earth, a part in the water, and a part rising 

 above, the part in the earth will turn into iron, the part 

 in the water into stone, while that which stands out 

 above will remain as before. But if you set any other 

 sort of wood in the lake, its nature will not change.f 



Again, there are two springs on a mountain called 

 Blandina,{ which is almost a desert mountain; these 

 have a peculiar nature. One of them has this property 

 that if you take either a white sheep, cow, or horse, or 

 a man with white hair, and wash any one of these with 

 the water, the white will immediately turn to coal black. 

 And such is the nature of the other spring in that place 

 that if a man washes himself in its water, his hair will 

 turn to a snowy white as if he were an aged man, no 

 matter what its color be before, whether red or white or 

 black. 



There is also a lake in that country which the natives 

 call Loycha. In that lake there is what appears to be a 

 little floating island; for it floats about in the lake, here 



* Error for aquifolium. 



f See the " Wonders of Ireland " (Irish Nennius, 195) where a similar ac- 

 count is given; but according to this " the part of it that sinks into the earth 

 will be stone, the part that remains in the water will be iron." Giraldus writes 

 of a petrifying well (fons) in the north of Ulster, but gives no place name. 

 Opera, V, 86. See also Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, II, 103. (Latin 

 poem on the wonders of Ireland.) 



J Blandina (Bladina, Bladma) is the Slieve-Bloom range in central Ireland. 

 Giraldus has heard of such springs, but he locates the one in Ulster and the 

 other in Munster. Opera, V, 84. A spring that whitens hair is mentioned in 

 Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, II, 104, and in the Irish Nennius, 195. 



