y
chimerical. Latin was from the first the language of the Church, and
being such, whether the Irish converts had or had not a form of writing,
one of the earliest duties of a Christian missionary was to teach those
preparing for the priesthood the language in which they were to
administer the sacraments. The alphabet given by the saint was simply
the common Roman letter then in use. The Celtic characteristic
veneration for antiquity and religion, has still preserved it; and
strange to say, the Irish of the nineteenth century alone use the
letters which were common to the entire Roman Empire in the fifth. The
early influence of ecclesiastical authority, and the circumstance that
the priests of the Catholic Church were at once the instructors in and
the preservers of letters, will account for the immediate disuse of
whatever alphabet the druids may have had. The third objection is a mere
_argumentum ad ignorantiam_.

[Illustration: CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS.]

It is to be regretted that the subject of Ogham writing has not been
taken up by a careful and competent hand.[161] There are few people who
have not found out some method of recording their history, and there are
few subjects of deeper interest than the study of the efforts of the
human mind to perpetuate itself in written characters. The Easterns had
their cuneiform or arrow-headed symbols, and the Western world has even
yet its quipus, and tells its history by the number of its knots.

[Illustration: The Quipus]

The peasant girl still knots her handkerchief as her _memoria technica_,
and the lady changes her ring from its accustomed finger. Each practice
is quite as primitive an effort of nature as the Ogham of the Celtic
bard. He used a stone pillar or a wooden stick for his notches,--a more
permanent record than the knot or the Indian quipus.[162] The use of a
stick as a vehicle for recording ideas by conventional marks, appears
very ancient; and this in itself forms a good argument for the antiquity
of Ogham writing. Mr. O'Curry has given it expressly as his opinion,
"that the pre-Christian Gaedhils possessed and practised a system of
writing and keeping records quite different from and independent of the
Greek and Roman form and characters, which gained currency in the
country after the introduction of Christianity." He then gives in
evidence passages from our ancient writings which are preserved, in
which the use of the Ogham character is distinctly mention