Irish studies in Hermathena

It is characteristic both of Trinity College and of Hermathena in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the scholars who contributed work on the Irish language in this period were men whose competence lay also, and in some cases mainly, in one or more other fields. Thus T. K. Abbott, in addition to his work as cataloguer of the college manuscripts and his Elements of logic, prescribed freshman reading for seventy years, wrote articles for Hermathena on Greek and Latin texts, biblical texts, astronomy ('The effect of the tides on the length of the day,' 1882), even on Basque; and, in fact, of the thirty articles of his listed in J. G. Smyly's Index only four are directly concerned with Irish. Three deal with the Irish version of the Bible: his paper, 'The history of the Irish Bible' (1912), is a pioneering work and still indispensable. (In it he records the interesting fact that during the Provostship of Narcissus Marsh the convert Paul Higgins, who assisted 6 Domh naill with his translation of the New Testament, had as one of his duties the preaching of a monthly sermon in Irish in the college chapel, and had an audience that never fell below 300.) Of the other two articles one is devoted to the vocabulary of the same Irish version and gives valuable addenda to Coneys' Irish-English dictionary. The other is a collation of the Irish versions of the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer and the Irish Bible. In addition in 1905 he had edited three valuable letters from Henry Bradshaw on the typography of early Irish printed books (mainly of the 17th century). Charles Graves, in addition to articles on mathematics and Greek papyri, investigated the Irish Ogham inscriptions (1876, 1877). The nature, origin and date of these texts is still a matter for discussion, and no one writing on them can afford to neglect the work of Graves, who concluded that Ogham was a cipher 'used for special purposes by persons possessing a different alphabet that served for common use', and who claimed to be able to identify