clan of Nemid, their wives having been stolen from them. They made alliance with the Tuatha Dea, and half the land was given to them. Eireamon took the north as the inheritance of his race. Eber took the south. Lugaidh, son of Ith, possessed certain districts, and Erin is full of the race of Ir.’ Such is a short abstract of this curious poem. The Milesians are here represented not as driving out the previous inhabitants, but as making alliance with them, and obtaining wives from the Tuatha De Danaan, their own wives having been taken from them by the Cruithnigh. Another version of this form of the legend of the Cruithnigh, is that ‘Cruithnechan, son of Cinge, son of Lochit, went from the sons of Miledh to the Britons of Fortrenn, to fight against the Saxons, and remained with them. But they had no wives, for the women of Alban had died. They then went back to the sons of Miledh, and swore by heaven and earth, and the sun and the moon, and by the dew and the elements, and by the sea and the land, that the regal succession should be on the mother’s side, and they took twelve of the women whose husbands had been drowned with Donn.’[199] In the form which these legends of the colonisation of Ireland assume in the Book of Conquests there are five successive colonies, but the first two, those of Partholan and Nemhidh, are separated from each other and from the latter by long internals, while the last three, beginning with the Firbolg, are continuous, each succeeding the other without interval. The older form, as contained in Maelmurra’s poem, knows nothing of Partholan and his colony, names the Firbolg first, and appears to identify the Clanna Nemidh with the Tuatha Dea.[200] An unfortunate resemblance between the name of the Firbolg and Cæsar’s Belgæ has led most writers to assume that they were the same people, to the great confusion of the early history of Ireland. There is nothing in the legend—and what we are told of the Firbolg is simply legendary—to warrant this, and the interpretation there given to the names Firbolg and Firdomnan harmonises very singularly with the legendary accounts of the tin-workers of Cornwall and the tin islands. It is not difficult to recognise in the tradition that the Firbolg derived their name from the leathern sacks which they filled with soil, and with which they covered their boats, and the Firdomnan from the pits they dug, the people who worked the tin by digging in the soil and transporting it in bags in their hide-covered boats. The traditions too of the physical characteristics of these early colonists of Ireland lead to the same conclusion. It is thus quoted in the preface to M‘Firbis’s Book of Genealogies: ‘Every one who is white [of skin], brown [of hair], bold, honourable, daring, prosperous, bountiful in the bestowal of property, wealth, and rings, and who is not afraid of battle or combat, they are the descendants of the sons of Miledh in Erinn. Every one who is