To the objection, Why not by another of the same name? Dr. Reeves replies in effect, “Not likely, as the name is almost unique and pointedly connected with the Columban society.” And to the further objection that it might possibly be by a later hand from the autograph of this Dorbene, he answers, “Even less likely, as the colophon in Irish MSS. is always peculiar to the actual scribe, and usually omitted by other transcribers. And this is the only MS. of Adamnan’s _Life_ that has the name and the colophon.” The interest attaching to it on account of its extraordinary age and subject-matter is greatly enhanced when we consider its history. For the old document had hairbreadth escapes and adventures, and if it could speak for itself doubtless could unfold a tale infinitely more surprising, because more real and tragic, than many of the miraculous incidents it does record. All the long agony of the early, the middle, and the modern ages has transpired since first it went a-wandering. Invasions, crusades, and revolutions, the rise and fall of systems and nations—whole populations passing swiftly and stormfully across the bosom of Europe into oblivion, and the book in the heart of the troubled area survives them all and emerges at length, as if from the debris, to reassert that “there lived a man.” Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, wrote the original in the years 691 to 693—that is, ten or twelve years before his death, which occurred in 704. In the second preface—for there are two—he tells us that it is the substance of the narratives learned from his predecessors, and is founded either on written authorities anterior to his own time or on what he heard himself from ancient men then living. And we know that he was sufficiently near the fountainhead, both in time and place, to be able to draw from authentic sources; for he wrote just a century after St. Columba’s death, and at the urgent request of his brethren. In his boyhood he had frequent opportunities of conversing with those who had seen and known the saint, and he was surrounded in the monastery and in the island with all the halo of association and piety in which the memory of his hero was enshrined. The written material he could rely on was not meagre even at so early a date. There was the narrative of Cummene the Fair, seventh abbot of Iona, and thus one of his own immediate predecessors. His account Adamnan transferred entire and almost verbatim into the third book of his own work. It was really a tract entitled _De virtutibus sancti Columbæ_. In addition to this he had at least one other Latin memoir and various Gaelic poems in praise of the saint, such as the “Amra” of Dallan Forgaill, and those of Baithene Mòr, and perhaps of St. Mura.