In the same sort of field, but without the addition of supernatural agency, we have another scene of scientific import in the _War of Inisthona_. Inisthona, according to Macpherson, was on the coast of Norway--he did not know where; Inisthona, according to Laing, was a wilful corruption of Inis-owen in Lough Foyle; Inisthona, in point of fact, was Iceland--as clearly and distinctly so in Macpherson's own text, as latitude, longitude, and physical configuration can make it; far more distinctly recognisable than any _Ultima Thule_ of the Romans. But here, in this Inisthona, we have first a fountain surrounded with mossy stones, in a grassy vale, at the head of a bay; then a wilderness of half a day's journey inland; then a lake at the end of the wilderness, exhaling pestilential vapours, called Lake Lano--but no volcano visible as yet: and in Iceland we have still the basin of the fountain, surrounded with its mossy stones, petrified and dried up by volcanic heat, at the head of the bay; we have still the dreary wilderness beyond it, now scorched and blackened, ending in the Plain of Thingvalla, where the King of Denmark was entertained more than a twelvemonth ago; we have still the lake beyond that, where it should be, but now relieved of its sulphurous vapours by eruptive jets of steam in its neighbourhood; and besides, we have now Mount Hecla in active operation, by whose accumulated fires and dreadful discharges, since Ossian's day, the whole island has been torn and desolated. Here, therefore, again, the same question of fact arises, and must be disposed of by all reasonable inquirers. In this one identification we have geography, geology, history, and navigation combined, beyond Macpherson's own comprehension--earthquakes, subterranean fires, latent volcanic forces; a beautiful island where there is now desolation; and a warlike people occupying its soil, subject to the Danes 600 years and more before the Danes themselves are supposed to have discovered it. In the face of such a revelation as this, nowhere else to be found but in Ossian, what does it signify that the Gaelic text of _Inisthona_ has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and fidelity of a man who has been called a liar and an impostor. One more miracle has yet to be added in the same field--viz., that Lake Lego or Lough Neagh in Ireland, and Lake Lano in Iceland, both emitting pestilential vapours, are geographically connected in Ossian with subterranean volcanic movements which pass from Ireland, by the west coast of Scotland, through the Orkneys to Inisthona; and thus the latest theories of the most accomplished geologists have been anticipated more than a hundred years before their announcement, by the work of a man who is supposed to have had no original to guide him, and who himself had not the remotest idea of what his own words conveyed.