In the light of modern historical research, it is absurd to claim that Columbus was the first discoverer of America. I am fully satisfied that Lief Erickson and his Norsemen from the islands of the Baltic discovered this Continent 500 years before Columbus; and I am as fully convinced that St. Brendan and his Irish Monks landed on the shores of this country about the middle of the sixth century. Owing to the fact that no permanent settlement or lasting results came from these discoveries, therefore they do not take a jot or tittle from the achievement of Christopher Columbus, whose name and fame are bound to live forever in the annals of the human race. The Oxford University press has just published a number of Irish manuscripts in the English language which have been in the Bodlien Library for centuries. Some of those Gaelic manuscripts also refer to the Brendanian voyages and discoveries. The early Portuguese explorers believed in the existence of the El Dorado, the undiscovered country of St. Brendan. The strongest proof of this is that when the Crown of Portugal was ceded to the Castilians, the treaty included St. Brendan’s land as a certain future discovery. The high religious reputation and singular fame of St. Brendan gave considerable value to his manuscripts, from which sprang up an unique literature, that planted in the brain of Columbus a desire to find the long lost Land of Promise, which he eventually discovered in the year 1492, a year forever memorable in the history of civilization. Why is it that nearly all the original Brendan manuscripts are in the Latin tongue? Chambers in his “Cyclopedia of English Literature” gives an excellent explanation: “The first unquestionably real author of distinction is St. Columbanus, a native of Ireland, who contributed greatly to the advance of Christianity in Western Europe and died in 615. He wrote religious treatises and Latin poetry. As yet no educated writer composed in his vernacular tongue. It was generally despised by the literary class, and Latin was held to be the only language fit for regular composition.” Both Columbanus and Columkill or Columba were contemporaries of St. Brendan. Doubtless St. Brendan was an accomplished Latin scholar. Throughout Europe, during the Middle Ages, Brendan’s voyage was a most popular subject in church literature. The Brendanian Manuscripts are still locked up in the various libraries of Europe, and only a few of them have been translated into any of the modern languages. It is to be hoped that some of the great scholars of Germany, as well as those of Ireland, will soon turn their attention to those old manuscripts. The Book of Lismore contains a life of Brendan in the Gaelic language, and the annals of Clonmacnoise devote considerable space to the career and achievements of the famous navigator.