Hardly anything in our old Ossianic ballads, of which we have such an interesting and ably edited collection in Mr. J. F. Campbell of Islay's Leabhar-na-Feinne, is so curious as the great number of dogs employed by the Fingalians in their huntings,--that is, if we are to read the ballads with anything like literalness. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, and even five hundred dogs are spoken about as freely as a modern sportsman speaks of couples. In one ballad, for instance, recovered by ourselves, ten men, one of them the balladist himself, the last remnant of the Fingalian host, are represented as going to hunt in the "Glen of Mist," attended by fifty dogs a piece, or five hundred in all--surely an unnecessary, if not an impossible number. In these ballads, besides, you find frequent reference to scarcity of food, and the shifts the "heroes" were often put to, to provide for the barest wants of the passing day; and yet, if such an army of dogs was necessary, it also had to be fed, which one conceives must have been a matter of some difficulty, when the heroes themselves were, as the ballads inform us, frequently reduced to the necessity of splitting "marrow bones," when all the flesh that covered them had already been used up. The whole question of the natural history of these old ballads is well worth more attention than has yet been bestowed on it. Some day or other we shall devote a special chapter to it. Meantime, let us merely say that we decided many years ago against the authenticity and genuineness of one at least of Dr. Smith's so-called Ancient Lays, because of the incorrectness of a reference to the natural history of a well-known bird, the common pigeon. Here are the lines in Gaul which first made us shake our head in dubiety over the genuineness of the composition-- "Mar cholum an carraig na h-Ulacha, 'S i solar dhearca da h-àl beag, 'S a' pilltinn gu tric, gun am blasad i fein, Tra dh'eireas an t-seabhag 'na smuainte." As a dove on the rock of Ulla, That gathereth berries for her young; Oft she returns, nor tastes herself the food, When rises the hawk within her thoughts. On which passage we would first of all remark that pigeons are not berry eaters, and even if they were, they would not carry them to their young in such wise as the poet clearly implies. A pigeon itself eats the food meant for its young, and only after undergoing a certain process of maceration and digestion in the parent's crop, is it again regurgitated in form suitable for the young. In genuine Gaelic poetry, the natural history is in a very remarkable manner almost invariably correct. Here it was not, and we recollect tossing the volume aside, and remarking that while much of Gaul might certainly be "ancient," quite as much was modern, and that, wittingly or unwittingly, Dr. Smith had been dealing in patch-work. Dr. Smith cites a parallel passage to the above from Thomson's Spring--