Patrick O’Brien, Richard O’Brien, Daniel Shay, John Shea, John Walsh, Joseph Walsh. Joseph Smith, Esq., of Lowell, read the following paper on “The Irishman Ethnologically Considered.” It is almost as hopeless a task to define an Irishman as it is to give the dimensions of a perfume; for the Irishman is as evasive and delusive, as pervasive and variable in type and character as the sweetness rising from the glowing bed of flowers. If this society is to have a logical and reasonable plea for existence, if its title of American-Irish is to mean anything, we must reach some solid basis upon which to build our fabric; we must agree upon an acceptable definition of what is an Irishman. This is what I shall try to do rather than attempt to show the ethnical components that enter into the Irishman. I have gone past the point in my speculations and theories on the Irishman where I place much stress upon the racial elements that go to make the Irish nation. We must start with these facts—the race and the nation are two distinctly different things; the terms Celtic and Irish are not synonymous. I will state, so as to avoid the polemics of ethnology, just a few facts upon which all people are agreed, to explain why I attach so little importance to the merely racial elements that go to make up a nation. The islands of Ireland and Great Britain were at one time peopled by the one race which was known variously as the Celtic, Cymric, and Gaelic. By emigration, conquest, settlement, slavery, and intermarriage, and all those causes that mix races, Dane, Norse, German, Norman-French, Dutch, French, Walloon, and Flemish were mingled and intermingled with the original race, the constituent elements varying with time, place, and circumstances. So we have to-day in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England four distinct peoples different in characteristics, temperaments, thought, and methods, peoples made up practically from the very same elements. As the different sections of Great Britain are separated by purely artificial frontiers, they do not differ as profoundly as do the people of Ireland from those of the neighboring island. We observe in this republic people who claim a direct descent from English and other stocks producing a people as widely separated in thought, ideals, and physical appearance, and other distinctive features from the stock of the old countries as the Russian is from the Spaniard. It is clear to me that there are other and more potent elements that make and differentiate peoples than mere racial admixtures.