MY DEAR PROFESSOR BLACKIE,—In the last number of _The Gael_ I find a translation by you from a German essay, and a quotation from a German writer who calls Macpherson's Ossian "the most magnificent mystification of modern times." The mists which surround this question need the light of knowledge to shine from the sitter on that rising Gaelic chair which you have done so much to uplift. In the meantime let me tell you three facts. On the 9th December 1872, I found out that Jerome Stone's Gaelic collection had been purchased by Mr Laing of the Signet Library, and that he had lent the manuscript to Mr Clerk of Kilmallie. On the 25th November 1872, I found a list of contents and three of the songs in the Advocates' Library, but too late to print them. The learned German relied on Stone's missing manuscript as proof of the antiquity of Macpherson's Ossian, because it was of older date. It contains versions of ten heroic ballads, of which I had printed many versions in "Leabhar na Feinne." There is not one line of the Gaelic printed in 1807 in those songs which I found. I presume that Mr Clerk would have quoted Stone's collection made in 1755 if he had found anything there to support his view, which is that Ossian's poems are authentic. Stone's translation is a florid English composition, founded upon the simple old Gaelic ballad which still survives traditionally. I got the old music from Mrs Mactavish at Knock, in Mull, last month. She learned it from a servant in Lorn, who sung to her when she was a girl. 2d, The essayist relied upon a lost manuscript which was named "A Bolg Solair" (the great treasure.) That designation seems to be a version of a name commonly given by collectors of Scotch and Irish popular lore to their manuscripts. The name seems rather to mean "rubbish bag." The idea was probably taken from the wallet of the wandering minstrel of the last century who sang for his supper. A very great number of paper manuscripts of this kind are in Dublin and in the British Museum. I own two; but not one of these, so far as I have been able to discover, contains a line of the Gaelic Ossian printed in 1807, which one learned German believed to be old and the other a mystification.