Note 837 — Chapter X · LEARNING AND LANGUAGE.

Mr. Burton, in his characteristic manner, rejects the Ogham character as unreal and the mere creation of fanciful antiquaries. He says, in his chapter on the sculptured stones (vol. i. p. 148)—‘It would be deemed by some unpardonable not to note that some scratchings on these stones have been set down as inscriptions in the Ogham or Ogam character. This professes to be a method of secret writing, being, indeed, no other than that in which the Druids concealed their mysteries. Its avowed qualities are simplicity and flexibility. These qualities are vouched for us on the faith of experiments made chiefly in Ireland, and especially of one in which two antiquaries had read an inscription to pretty nearly the same result, and afterwards found, on comparison of notes, that the one had read from left to right and the other from right to left. This phenomenon seems not to have created much surprise among the learned body who received the reports of the decipherers. That the inscription could be read either way was only a testimony to the power and simplicity of the Ogham character, which has also the faculty that, by shifting the places of the letters or cyphers, a long story may be made out of a few straight lines.’ And Mr. Burton’s sole reference is to a paper in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (i. 3), read in the year 1785.

It would have been unfair to Mr. Burton not to give his reasons for rejecting the Ogham as spurious, as the author cannot refrain from saying that it appears almost incredible to him that any one professing to have made himself acquainted with the literature of the subject could give so uncandid an account of it. The Book of Ballimote, a MS. compiled in the year 1383, contains an account of the Ogham manner of writing, with several alphabets, one of which corresponds with the inscriptions found in numerous stone monuments in Ireland and in Wales, several of those in the latter country being biliteral, and having a corresponding inscription in debased Roman characters. That it was a secret mode of writing known to the Druids is the opinion of only a small section among antiquaries, and is not generally received. Its true character was very clearly brought out by Dr. Graves, now bishop of Limerick, in two papers read in 1848 and 1849 to the same body as that referred to by Mr. Burton (see Proc. R. I. A., vol. iv. pp. 174, 356); and the investigations of Dr. Graves and Dr. Samuel Ferguson in Ireland, and Professor Westwood in Wales, all of which Mr. Burton simply ignores, have placed the genuineness of the Ogham inscriptions beyond the reach of challenge.