and all the other elements of God; the Apostles, Gregory, the two Patricks, and other Irish saints. The terms of the oath explain the form of St. Patrick’s famous hymn. The construction of the treatise is extremely loose; the form, in many places, is that of the ecclesiastical legend, and the present redaction was evidently made in the clerical interest. As a further instance of its composite character, in c. 33 it makes a fresh start with the words _Incipit sententia angeli Adamnano_, and relates how the angel, after two previous punishments inflicted, came to Adamnán and smote him on the side, bidding him go to Ireland and enact a law that no woman should be slain with impunity. It also states that Adamnán’s law was extended to clerical students and children, and further gives sundry amendments of the laws relating to cases of assault, rape, slander of chastity, etc. Women, in turn, were made liable for the crimes they might commit; in particular, they were rendered punishable for poison, arson, or undermining a church by the old Irish penalty of being set adrift in a boat with a single paddle, and one vessel of meal and one of water. The accuracy of this treatise in point of detail hardly calls for discussion. It is a specimen of the form in which we have received much of our information concerning ancient Ireland; a form combining fact and fiction in a manner which often renders it impossible to distinguish between the two without extraneous evidence, which is seldom to be had. Here we have as the substratum an account of Adamnán’s actual legislation, set off with an abundance of fictitious detail, in which a redactor has attempted to combine two different accounts of the circumstances which brought about Adamnán’s action, while he has added a quantity of other legislative reforms, more or less connected with the subject, but only a part of which, if any, can be due to Adamnán himself. Here, as in the case of the Boruma, it is left for the most part to our subjective views of probability to determine what amount of reliance is to be placed upon the historical facts which form the main subject of the treatise. Despite the crudity of the work, perhaps the evidence in favour is rather stronger in this case, for not only is it natural to assume that the statements of a legal nature would be tolerably in accordance with the facts, which must have been known to many of the readers, but the ascription of the reform to Adamnán--under the alternative name of the _lex innocentium_--appears to have been accepted without hesitation by several independent authorities, including the _Annals of Ulster_ and the _Fis Adamnáin_.