ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY. 
229 
tains, and he has supported his theory by most ingenious arguments, 
that there exist in the Hebrew text traces of a vocalization much more 
ancient than the points, aiming at supplying the defects of a syllabic 
alphabet by the insertion of vowel-letters, not actually vowels—-for they 
are used also as consonants—but of a class of letters peculiar to the She- 
mitic languages, which grammarians, by a sort of anticipation of Dr. 
"Wall’s theory, have called matres lectionis. This older vocalization he 
believes to have been completed about the second century of our era; 
and consequently, like the points, to be no more than an uninspired com¬ 
mentary, of great value indeed, but still an uninspired commentary on 
the text. He believes this commentary to contain many errors, and to 
be susceptible of improvement, and he has thus opened to Biblical critics 
a new field of investigation for the emendation and correction of the text. 
I am afraid that I cannot venture to enter more in detail into the 
explanation of Dr. Walks theory; but I cannot help referring you to 
his comparison of the present Biblical Hebrew with the ancient Phoeni¬ 
cian inscriptions, chap. vi. of his last volume, which is certainly one of 
the most curious and ingenious arguments he has adduced in favour of 
his theory of the ancient use of the matres lectionis, as vowel-letters. 
I would also notice his very ingenious explanation of the feminine 
forms in the verb, which he accounts for by supposing that the ancient 
Hebrew pronoun had no gender; he, she, and it, having been denoted by 
the same sound, so that it was necessary to denote the sex of the speaker 
or agent by giving gender to the verb. And he shows that this obser¬ 
vation enables us to clear up many apparent inconsistencies in our pre¬ 
sent text, and to explain many anomalies and mistakes in the Masoretic 
vocalization. 
IY. Dr. Beeves, for his valuable edition of Adamnan’s. “ Life of St. 
Columba,” has been awarded a Medal in the department of Antiquities. 
To estimate the value of the original work, it is necessary to remark 
that its author, St. Adamnan, flourished in the middle of the seventh 
century, and that the MS. from which Dr. Beeves has printed was written 
by a scribe, who is, in all probability, to be identified with the Dorbene 
who was Abbot of Hy for five months only, and whose death is recorded 
by our Annals on October 28, 713 : and as Adamnan died in 704, it is 
not impossible that this valuable MS. (now at Schaffhausen, and for¬ 
merly belonging to the Irish Monastery of Beichenau), may have been 
written before the death of Adamnan, and, perhaps, under his inspec¬ 
tion. 
This MS. is professedly the text from which Colgan’s edition of the 
life was printed ; but there are so many arbitrary alterations, and such 
gross typographical errors in that edition—omissions frequently of whole 
sentences-—that to Dr. Beeves belongs the honour of having, for the 
first time, given a correct and scholarlike edition of the text of this 
ancient and authentic work, retaining the curious orthography of the 
MS., which Colgan modernized; for in Colgan’s time the importance of 
retaining these seeming inaccuracies of spelling was not understood; but 
we now know them, very much from Dr. Beeves’s labours, to be of the 
VOL. V.-PROC. SOC. 2 H 
