Few of our readers are probably aware that the English government, for the last ten years, has been making fac‐similes of the most important national MSS., for publication and sale, by the process of photo‐zincography. The _Domesday Book_ was the first work taken in hand. This wonderful record, without a peer in the world, is a general survey of the land of England, ordered by William the Conqueror in the year of our Lord 1085. It is the undisputed testimony of the relations existing at that period between the landlords and their tenants; and it describes the state of society which existed in England under the Anglo‐Saxon kings up to the conquest of the kingdom by the Duke of Normandy. So successfully was the printing of the fac‐similes of the _Domesday Book_ accomplished, and so acceptable to historical students of every degree was its publication, that, in the spring of 1864, the Lords of H. M. Treasury unanimously endorsed the proposal by the late Master of the Rolls (Lord Romilly) that the same process of photo‐zincography should be applied to the reproduction and perpetuation of some of the “National Records.” Three volumes of English manuscripts and three volumes of Scottish manuscripts have been followed by the preparation for three volumes of Irish national MSS., which will rank (says Mr. William Basevi Sanders, the Assistant Keeper of Her Majesty’s Records, in his _Annual Report_, printed in the year 1873, on the fac‐similes photo‐zincographed at the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton) among the first of the many valuable publications which Sir Henry James (the military engineer officer in charge) has been the means of laying before the public. Let us look over Mr. Sanders’s description of the Irish MSS. He has gathered his information from the best sources, having consulted and freely used O’Donovan’s edition of the _Annals of the Four Masters_, the accessible works of Dr. Petrie, Dr. Todd, Dr. Reeves, and Prof. Westwood, and more particularly from the elaborate investigations of Prof. O’Curry, published in his _Lectures on the MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History_. The first of these MSS., both in point of age and on account of the remarkable history that attaches to it, is the volume known as _Domhnach Airgid_, or _Silver Shrine_. This is a volume of the Gospels—perhaps the oldest in the world—of the Vth century, and traditionally believed to have been the private book of devotion of S. Patrick himself, and to have been given by him to S. Mac Carthainn when he placed him over the See of Clogher. The legend in which this curious story is narrated appears in the _Tripartite Life of S. Patrick_, and O’Curry in his lectures gives the following literal translation of it: