e distinctly recognisable than any _Ultima Thule_ of the Romans.
But here, in this Inisthona, we have first a fountain surrounded with
mossy stones, in a grassy vale, at the head of a bay; then a wilderness
of half a day's journey inland; then a lake at the end of the wilderness,
exhaling pestilential vapours, called Lake Lano--but no volcano visible
as yet: and in Iceland we have still the basin of the fountain,
surrounded with its mossy stones, petrified and dried up by volcanic heat,
at the head of the bay; we have still the dreary wilderness beyond it,
now scorched and blackened, ending in the Plain of Thingvalla, where the
King of Denmark was entertained more than a twelvemonth ago; we have
still the lake beyond that, where it should be, but now relieved of its
sulphurous vapours by eruptive jets of steam in its neighbourhood; and
besides, we have now Mount Hecla in active operation, by whose accumulated
fires and dreadful discharges, since Ossian's day, the whole island has
been torn and desolated. Here, therefore, again, the same question of
fact arises, and must be disposed of by all reasonable inquirers. In this
one identification we have geography, geology, history, and navigation
combined, beyond Macpherson's own comprehension--earthquakes, subterranean
fires, latent volcanic forces; a beautiful island where there is now
desolation; and a warlike people occupying its soil, subject to the Danes
600 years and more before the Danes themselves are supposed to have
discovered it. In the face of such a revelation as this, nowhere else to
be found but in Ossian, what does it signify that the Gaelic text of
_Inisthona_ has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only
a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and
fidelity of a man who has been called a liar and an impostor.

One more miracle has yet to be added in the same field--viz., that Lake
Lego or Lough Neagh in Ireland, and Lake Lano in Iceland, both emitting
pestilential vapours, are geographically connected in Ossian with
subterranean volcanic movements which pass from Ireland, by the west
coast of Scotland, through the Orkneys to Inisthona; and thus the latest
theories of the most accomplished geologists have been anticipated more
than a hundred years before their announcement, by the work of a man who
is supposed to have had no original to guide him, and who himself had
not the remotest idea of what his own words conveyed.