x distinct "takings," invasions, or
colonizations of Ireland in pre-Christian times.

It may startle some of our readers to find any mention of Irish history
"before the Flood," but we think the burden of proof, to use a logical
term, lies rather with those who doubt the possibility, than with those
who accept as tradition, and as _possibly_ true, the statements which
have been transmitted for centuries by careful hands. There can be no
doubt that a high degree of cultivation, and considerable advancement in
science, had been attained by the more immediate descendants of our
first parents. Navigation and commerce existed, and Ireland may have
been colonized. The sons of Noah must have remembered and preserved the
traditions of their ancestors, and transmitted them to their
descendants. Hence, it depended on the relative anxiety of these
descendants to preserve the history of the world before the Flood, how
much posterity should know of it. MacFirbis thus answers the objections
of those who, even in his day, questioned the possibility of preserving
such records:--"If there be any one who shall ask who preserved the
history [_Seanchus_], let him know that they were very ancient and
long-lived old men, recording elders of great age, whom God permitted to
preserve and hand down the history of Erinn, in books, in succession,
one after another, from the Deluge to the time of St. Patrick."

The artificial state of society in our own age, has probably acted
disadvantageously on our literary researches, if not on our moral
character. Civilization is a relative arbitrary term; and the ancestors
whom we are pleased to term uncivilized, may have possessed as high a
degree of mental culture as ourselves, though it unquestionably differed
in kind. Job wrote his epic poem in a state of society which we should
probably term uncultivated; and when Lamech gave utterance to the most
ancient and the saddest of human lyrics, the world was in its infancy,
and it would appear as if the first artificer in "brass and iron" had
only helped to make homicide more easy. We can scarce deny that murder,
cruel injustice, and the worst forms of inhumanity, are but too common
in countries which boast of no ordinary refinement; and we should
hesitate ere we condemn any state of society as uncivilized, simply
because we find such crimes in the pages of their history.

The question of the early, if not pre-Noahacian colonization of Ireland,
though distin