An old man named John O'Regan of New Zealand, who had been twelve years in exile in the United States and forty-eight on the Australian continent, with failing eyesight, in a letter that took him from January to June of the year 1906 to write, endeavored to set down scraps of Irish lore which he had carried with him from the old country and which had clung to his memory to the last. "In my digging life in the quarries," he says, "books were not a part of our swag (prayerbook excepted). In 1871, when I had a long seat of work before me, I sent for McCurtin's Dictionary to Melbourne. It is old and wanting in the introductory part, but for all was splendid and I loved it as my life." (See _Gaelic Journal_, Dec., 1906.) REFERENCES: Joyce: A Social History of Ancient Ireland (2 vols., 2d ed., Dublin, 1913); Healy: Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars (Dublin, 1890), Maynooth College Centenary History (Dublin, 1895); O'Curry: Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, (3 vols., Dublin and London, 1873), Manuscript Materials of Irish History, reissue (Dublin, 1873); Carleton: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, especially vol. 3, The Poor Scholar; Montalembert: The Monks of the West, authorized translation, (7 vols., London, 1861); Meyer: Learning in Ireland in the Fifth Century (Dublin, 1913); Dinneen: Poems of Eoghan Ruadh O'Sullivan, Introduction (Dublin, 1902), The Maigue Poets, Introduction (Dublin, 1906); Boyle: The Irish College in Paris 1578-1901, with a brief sketch of the other Irish Colleges in France (Dublin, 1901); Irish Ecclesiastical Record, new series, vol. VIII, 307, 465; 3rd series, vol. VII, 350, 437, 641. IRISH MEN OF SCIENCE By SIR BERTRAM C.A. WINDLE, Sc.D., M.D., _President, University College, Cork_. We may divide our survey of the debt owed to Ireland by science into three periods: the earliest, the intermediate, and the latest. In the earliest period the names which come before us are chiefly those of compilers such as Augustin, a monk and an Irishman who wrote at Carthage, in Africa, in the seventh century, a Latin treatise on _The Wonderful Things of the Sacred Scripture_, still extant, in which, in connection with Joshua's miracle, a very full account of the astronomical knowledge of the period, Ptolemaic, but in many ways remarkably accurate, is given. There are, however, three distinguished names. Virgil the Geometer, _i.e._, Fergil (O'Farrell), was Abbot of Aghaboe, went to the continent in 741, and was afterwards Bishop of Salzburg. He died in 785. He is remembered by his controversies with St. Boniface, one of which is concerned with the question of the Antipodes. Virgil is supposed to have been the first to teach that the earth is spherical. So celebrated was he that it has been thought that a part of the favor in which the author of the _Aeneid_ was held by medieval churchmen was due to a confusion between his name and that of the geometer, sometimes spoken of as St. Virgil.