by the fascination of learning and
of the cultivation of the nobler part of his nature.

As might have been expected, the Irish who have emigrated to the
American and Australian continents have given touching proof of their
devotion to the cause of learning. I have space only for a few
pathetic examples.

An Irish workman in the United States, seeing my name in connection
with an Irish Dictionary, wrote to me a few years ago to ask how he
might procure one, as, he said, an Italian in the works had asked him
the meaning of _Erin go bragh_, and he felt ashamed to be unable to
explain it.

A man who, at the age of three, had emigrated from Clare in the
famine time, wrote to me recently from Australia in the Irish
language and character.

An old man named John O'Regan of New Zealand, who had been twelve
years in exile in the United States and forty-eight on the Australian
continent, with failing eyesight, in a letter that took him from
January to June of the year 1906 to write, endeavored to set down
scraps of Irish lore which he had carried with him from the old
country and which had clung to his memory to the last.

"In my digging life in the quarries," he says, "books were not a part
of our swag (prayerbook excepted). In 1871, when I had a long seat of
work before me, I sent for McCurtin's Dictionary to Melbourne. It is
old and wanting in the introductory part, but for all was splendid
and I loved it as my life." (See _Gaelic Journal_, Dec., 1906.)

REFERENCES:

Joyce: A Social History of Ancient Ireland (2 vols., 2d ed., Dublin,
1913); Healy: Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars (Dublin, 1890),
Maynooth College Centenary History (Dublin, 1895); O'Curry: Manners
and Customs of the Ancient Irish, (3 vols., Dublin and London, 1873),
Manuscript Materials of Irish History, reissue (Dublin, 1873);
Carleton: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, especially vol.
3, The Poor Scholar; Montalembert: The Monks of the West, authorized
translation, (7 vols., London, 1861); Meyer: Learning in Ireland in
the Fifth Century (Dublin, 1913); Dinneen: Poems of Eoghan Ruadh
O'Sullivan, Introduction (Dublin, 1902), The Maigue Poets,
Introduction (Dublin, 1906); Boyle: The Irish College in Paris
1578-1901, with a brief sketch of the other Irish Colleges in France
(Dublin, 1901); Irish Ecclesiastical Record, new series, vol. VIII,
307, 465; 3rd series, vol. VII, 350, 437, 641.

IRISH MEN OF SCIENCE

By SIR BERTRAM C.A