aring naturalist under
his highest oak. Is it quite sure that the Prior of Armagh, or the
founder of the Royal Academy of Clonard, the good Saint Finnan
himself, would have served them much better? Certain, however, it
is, that the Druids, Bards, Filiahs, Senachies and Saints of
Ireland, who left such mighty reputations behind them for
learning, have not dropped one word on the subject of the natural
history of their 'Isle of Song;' and though they may have dabbled
a little in that prosaic pursuit, they probably soon discovered
its perilous tendency, and sang with the last and most charming of
Irish Bards,--

'No, Science, to you
We have long bade a last and careless adieu.'

"Nearly two thousand years after the foundation of the most
learned Academies of Ireland, a pretty little Zoological Garden
was opened in the capital of the country; but no living type of
the Irish wolf-dog is to be found there, nor were any 'fossil
remains' of the noble animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G]
which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of
capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence,
and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful
farcical Irish writers of his time;[H] for in Ireland,

'Tout finis par un chanson,'

(as Figaro had it of the France of his age,) when worse results do
not follow disappointment.

"The Irish wolf-dog, therefore, it may be asserted, belongs to the
poetical traditions of Ireland, or to its remote Milesian
histories. 'Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, and others, the
immediate posterity of Noah, after the dispersion of mankind at
Babel, ventured (it is said), to 'commit themselves by ships upon
the sea,' to search out the unknown corners of the world, and thus
found out a western land called Ireland.'--(Dr. Warner.)

"It is probable they were the first to disturb its tranquillity by
the introduction of wolves, a fragment of the menagerie of the
Ark; for all noxious and destructive animals and reptiles were
brought into Ireland by her invaders. The soil and clime of the
'woody Morven,' however, though not genial to their
naturalisation, was long a prey to one of the most ferocious
animals imported by foreign aggression to increase and multiply.