The clans of Scotland, blood relations and descendants of the Irish, chose for emblems, or "badges," either a plant or its flower. Thus, the MacKays chose the bulrush. The general badge for Irishmen, as you know, is a little plant like the sorrel, called the shamrock; while that for Scotland is, appropriately enough, the hardy, prickly, but not unbeautiful thistle. The English, too, show traces of the same idea; their race-badge is the rose, a foreign plant, perhaps because they were more thoroughly subjugated by the Normans than were the Scotch and Irish; perhaps because their land is like a rose-garden for cultivation. Now, some Irishmen have claimed that the Phoenicians made settlements in Ireland many centuries before Christ. If they ever taught their alphabet to the tribes of that island, it has been crowded out by others, or has fallen into disuse. Some kind of writing had existed before the Christians introduced the _bethluisnion_; there is hardly a doubt that altered Greek letters, known as Runes, were used in Ireland; but with the exception of the mysterious Oghans, which will be noticed further on, none are to be found; for, just as nations have been struggling with nations from the earliest period to which we can look back, and forms of government with other forms, and languages with languages, so systems of writing have been struggling with systems of writing. Sooner or later the best, that is to say, the most convenient, alphabet wins the day. Within a few centuries, the rounded and perfected form of the Christian alphabet has taken the place of the old Irish alphabet, which was itself an earlier form of the very same Christian letters.