Since his time the new basis which he found for Celtic studies has been wonderfully enlarged, chiefly through the discovery of other Gaelic texts contemporary with some of those that served for his own beautiful work. And then the remarkable publications of erudite men in Dublin, and the excellent work of Windisch, Professor of Sanskrit at Leipzig, have called the attention of experts on the continent to a great mass of documentary material in the British Isles. Under the transcription and retouching of many of these MSS. by later copyists, there are found original compositions, primarily in the ancient Gaelic of which Zeuss was the first interpreter. Unlike the glosses, they furnish us with a vast storehouse of new ideas and traditions of every sort, comprising especially the mythological and legendary, the legal also, and even the grammatical under various forms. Their originality is unquestionable. These texts, in carrying us back to pagan times, throw quite unexpected light on the incomplete though precious accounts which ancient writers like Cæsar, Diodorus of Sicily, and Strabo have given of the primitive civilisation of the Gauls. We should expect to find in this mass of curious heroic literature some expression of the traditions common to all the Celtic race before the settlement of the different branches in the countries which now bear their name, and we are not disappointed. The MSS. preserved do give us a crowd of fresh thoughts on the beliefs and customs of the Celts in the most ancient epochs of their history. In this respect they help to gratify the longing desire of living men to know something of the actions, the range of thought, the character of mind, the habits, the tastes, the arts, the religion, and, in short, the everyday life of so old and venerable a race as our own, which has played such a wonderful part in the drama of history. The French authorities have been fully alive to the value of these studies, and on one occasion, at least, the Minister of Public Instruction showed his interest in a very practical and laudable way. In February of 1881 Jules Ferry, who was in office at the time, appointed H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Professor of Celtic in the College of France, as a special commissioner to visit the British Isles, and investigate and make a list of all the Gaelic MSS. he could find. This literary mission De Jubainville carried out the same year, subsequently embodying his report in a book which gives not only his catalogue of MSS. inspected in England and Ireland, but also a list of those on the Continent. For some reason or other he omitted to include Scotland in the area of his research, and so the large collection of valuable documents in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, is not chronicled in his interesting résumé. Yet still, we have now for the first time a pretty general estimate of all the more important material available.