Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1106:  ’Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.’  Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.  This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb.  Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written between the lines.  This gloss quotes, for the explanation of obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth century, have been still in existence.  Nothing can be sounder; every step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along.  O’Curry thus affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.

Science’s reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched, philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates.  Races and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been often rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from having yet really reached unity.  Science has and will long have to be a divider and a separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful connections, and dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible unity.  Still, science,—­true science,—­recognises in the bottom of her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation.  To reach this, but to reach it legitimately, she tends.  She draws, for instance, towards the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister, poetry,—­the idea of the substantial unity of man; though she draws towards it by roads of her own.  But continually she is showing us affinity where we imagined there was isolation.  What school-boy of us has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory account of that old name for the Peloponnese, the Apian Land? and within the limits of Greek itself there is none.  But the Scythian name for earth ‘apia,’ watery, water-issued, meaning first isle and then land—­this name, which we find in ‘avia,’ ScandinAVIA, and in ‘ey’ for AldernEY, not only explains the Apian Land of Sophocles for us, but points the way to a whole world of relationships of which we knew nothing.  The Scythians themselves again,—­obscure, far-separated Mongolian people as they used to appear to us,—­when we find that they are essentially Teutonic and Indo-European, their very name the same word as the common Latin word ‘scutum,’ the shielded people, what a surprise they give us!  And then, before we have recovered from this surprise we learn that the name of their father and god, Targitavus, carries us I know not how much further into familiar company.  This divinity, Shining with the targe, the Greek