4 2a O G H 
OGEVIL'LER, a town of France, in the department 
of the Meurte: four miles fouth-weft of Blamont, and 
three eaft of Luneville. 
• OGGANI'TION,/ [oggannio, Lat.] The aft of fnarl- 
ing like a dog; murmuring; grumbling.—Nor will I ab- 
ftain, notwithftanding your oggnnition, to follow the 
fteps and praitice of antiquity. Montagu's App. to Ccefar, 
1625. 
OG'GERSHEIM, late a town of France, in the depart¬ 
ment of Mont Tonnere, on the Rhine, in a country re¬ 
markable for its fertility in fruit and vegetables. It is 
four miles weft-north-weft of Manheim, and nine fouth 
of Worms. Lat. 49.28. N. Ion. S. 24.. E. 
OGGIA'NO, a town of Italy, in the department of 
the Lario : eleven miles eaft-fouth-eaft of Como. 
OG'HAM ,f A particular kind of fteganography, or 
writing in cipher, praitifed by the Irifh.—King Charles I. 
correfponded with the earl of Glamorgan when in Ire¬ 
land, in the ogham cipher. Afile's Orig. and Prog, of 
Writing. 
According to the rnoft accurate and bell informed wri¬ 
ters on the fubjeit of Irifli charailers, there were three 
kinds of oghams. 
1. Ogham beith, where h h, or the Irifli letter bcith, the 
firft confonant, is ufed inftead of the vowel a. To this 
ogham, the name of ogham confoirie is given. Harris, in 
his edition of fir J. Ware's Antiquities of Ireland, gives 
the following example of it : 
a e i o u 
bh fc n g dl ft 
Sometimes confonants were fubftituted for diphthongs, 
as in the following example: 
a e 5 a u a io o i 
mm 11 bb cc pp 
a. The fecond kind was called ogham coll, or the og¬ 
ham formed out of the letter c, to which the name of cull 
is gjven in the Bethluifnion alphabet: in this kind of 
ogham, the letter c is fubftituted for all the vowels, diph¬ 
thongs, and triphthongs, repeated, doubled, and turned 
in various ways. The following are examples of this 
fpecies of ogham : 
a 
e 
1 
0 
u 
c 
c cc c 
c c c c 
c c 
c c c 
e a 
i a 
0 i 
i 0 
u a 
0 
0 
0 
D D 
Before proceeding to the confideration of the third 
kind of ogham, it may be proper to offer a few remarks 
on the two fpecies which have been juft deferibed. It is 
fufficiently obvious that their antiquity cannot be great ; 
and that the ufe of them was by no means confined to 
the lrilh nation, even at the earlieft period to which it 
can be traced. We are informed by Suetonius, in his 
Life of Julius Csefar, and by Dio, that that emperor, 
■when he wrote to any one what he wilhed to be kept Se¬ 
cret, always employed the fourth letter after that which 
he ought to have ufed ; as d for a , e for h, &c. and Sue¬ 
tonius and Ifidorus relate that Auguftus had alfo a cipher 
which he employed in his writings when he wifiiedthem 
to be keptfecret, ufing the letter following that which he 
ought to have employed, as h for a, and c for h: fometimes 
he varied his cipher, and for the letter z ufed a a. Indeed, 
this cipher-mode of writing, to which the two fpecies of 
the lrilh oghams which we have deferibed evidently be¬ 
long, was not only well known to the Greeks and Romans, 
but was employed by them in various forms, and reduced 
to a clear and regular fyftem. 
But cryptographic modes of writing, exailly fimilar to 
the two fpecies of lrilh oghams which have been deferibed, 
were prailifed in all the northern countries of Europe. In 
the Icelandic Edda at Upfal, is an example of the firft 
fpecies of ogham, or the ogham confoine, where, inftead 
of the vowel, the confonant which follows next in the al- 
A M. 
phabet is placed, as Dfxtfrt fcrliptprhs bfnfdhtk sh( 
pmnhbxs liprhs. Here, inftead of a, e :i i,.o, y, the con- 
fonants h, f, k, p, x, and s, are placed; fo that the true 
reading is Dextera fcriptoris benedifla fit omnibus koris. A 
fimilar cipher was ufed by the Anglo-Saxons. 
3. The third fort is the ogham croabh, or the virgular 
ogham, which is thus deferibed by Mr. Aftle, in his Ori¬ 
gin of Writing. “ It was cotnpofed of certain lines or 
marks, which derivistheir power from their fituation or 
pofition, as they ftand in relation to one principal line, 
over or under which they are placed, or through which 
they are drawn. The principal line is horizontal, and ferves 
for a rule or guide, whole upper part is called the left, 
and the under fide the right; above, under, and through, 
which line, the charailers or marks aredrawn, which ftand 
in the place of vowels, confonants, diphthongs, and 'triph¬ 
thongs.” In a fpecimen which he gives of ogham wri¬ 
ting of this kind, taken from Ware’s Antiquities of 
Ireland, the cipher is very fimple. The horizontal line 
is the principal, or mafter-line, as it is called; and the 
perpendicular and diagonal lines, above, below, and 
through, the horizontal line, ftand for twenty letters, in 
four divifions of five letters each ; the confonants are 
reprefented by the firft fifteen, and the vowels by the 
laft five : arbitrary marks are fubftituted for the diph¬ 
thongs and the letter Z. Colonel Valiancey, in his Irifh 
Grammar, gives a fpecitnen of this kind of ogham, in 
which the cipher is different from that given by fir J. 
Ware, the diagonal lines (landing for the vowels. 
That however there is great uncertainty refpeiling 
the cipher of this kind of ogham, is evident from the 
account that colonel Valiancey gives of it in another 
place. In a paper of this gentleman, in the 7th volume 
of the Archteologia, he confefles that he had erroneoufly 
faid that the ogham characters were marked by certain 
ftrokes Handing perpendicularly on an horizontal mafter- 
line; but from ancient MSS. he found that the mafter- 
line was dra wn perpendicular, and the characters marked 
by ftrokes perpendicular to it, over the right and left; 
yet in the fame paper he gives another manner of wri¬ 
ting the ogham, in which horizontal ftrokes are drawn 
on each fide of a perpendicular line. Other writers give 
fpecimens of circular oghams ; fo that, if the Irifh anti¬ 
quaries are to be credited, there are, 1 ft, the circular 
mode of drawing the ogham; 2d, the ogham on a hori¬ 
zontal mafter-line with perpendicular ftrokes ; 3d, the 
ogham on a perpendicular mafter-line with perpendicular 
ftrokes 5 and 4th, the ogham on the perpendicular maf¬ 
ter-line with horizontal ftrokes. Whatever may be the 
antiquity of this fpecies of cryptographic writing, it is 
evident that the mode of interpreting it muft be very 
loofe and ambiguous, and that no dependance can be 
placed on the meaning of the inferiptions which are 
found in it. 
But this fpecies of ogham is reprefented by the Irifli an¬ 
tiquaries, not only as cryptographic, but as ftenographic : 
how little it deferves the latter charaCler may be eafily 
made obvious. It requires fifteen lines or ftrokes to expref's 
the firft five letters of the alphabet, or fifty-one for the 
eighteen elements of the Irifli language. Yet this is the 
ogham which colonel Valiancey allures us, in his Irifh 
Grammar, “the Irifli antiquaries preferved as a piece of 
the greateft value, and that it was penal for any but the 
Druids to ftudy or ufe it.” 
Sir James Ware is the firft author who mentions the 
ogham croabh , or virgular ogham. (Antiquities of Ire¬ 
land, xi. 20.) He fays, that he was in poffeffion of a 
thick MS. written entirely in this ogham. Keyfler men¬ 
tions, that in his time (1720) the earl of Carnarvon had 
in his library a MS. on this kind of writing; and Aftle 
refers to a MS. prefented to the Britifli Mufeum by the 
late Rev. Dr. Milles, dean of Exeter, prefident of the 
Society of Antiquaries at London, which had formerly 
been in the library of Henry earl of Clarendon. Among 
the trails of this MS. volume, there is one entitled 
“ (Anomymi 
