Colgan explains the term Duine Sidh thus:  “Fantastical spirits,” he writes, “are by the Irish called men of the Sidh, because they are seen, as it were, to come out of the beautiful hills to infest men, and hence the vulgar belief that they reside in certain subterranean habitations:  and sometimes the hills themselves are called, by the Irish, Sidhe or Siodha.”

No doubt, when the princesses spoke of the gods of the earth, reference was made to such pagan deities as Beal; Dagda the great or the good god; Aine, the Moon, goddess of the water and of wisdom; Manannan macLir, the Irish Neptune; Crom, the Irish Ceres; and Iphinn, the benevolent, whose relations to the Irish Oirfidh resembled those of Apollo towards Orpheus; and to the allegiance they owed to the Elements, the Wind, and the Stars.  But besides these pagan divinities and powers, and quite apart from them, the early Irish believed in two classes of fairies:  in the first place, a hierarchy of fairy beings, well and ill disposed, not differing in appearance, to any great degree at any rate, from human beings—­good spirits and demons, rarely visible during the daytime; and, in the second place, there was the magic race of the De Danann, who, after conquest by the Milesians, transformed themselves into fairies, and in that guise continued to inhabit the underworld of the Irish hills, and to issue thence in support of Irish heroes, or to give their aid against other fairy adversaries.

There is another theory to account for the fairy race.  It is that they are angels who revolted with Satan and were excluded from heaven for their unworthiness, but were not found evil enough for hell, and therefore were allowed to occupy that intermediate space which has been called “the Other World.”  It is still a moot point with the Irish peasantry, as it was with the Irish saints of old, whether, after being compelled to dwell without death among rocks and hills, lakes and seas, bushes and forest, till the day of judgment, the fairies then have the chance of salvation.  Indeed, the fairies are themselves believed to have great doubts of a future existence, though, like many men, entertaining undefined hopes of happiness; and hence the enmity which some of them have for mankind, who, they acknowledge, will live eternally.  Thus their actions are balanced between generosity and vindictiveness towards the human race.

Mr. W.Y.  Evans Wentz, A.M., of Leland Stanford University, California, and Jesus College, Oxford, has received an honorary degree from the latter university for his thesis, “The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries:  Its Psychical Origin and Nature”, a most laborious as well as ingenious work, whose object is to prove “that the origin of the fairy faith is psychical, and that fairyland, being thought of as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed as an island in an unexplored ocean, actually exists, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings