His next argument is, “that the _busy_ and _fantastic bard_, whose occupation led him to interfere in private and public concerns,--who, in truth (he adds) is our oldest and most circumstantial annalist,--on the subject of the Pillar Tower is dumb and silent as the dead”; whence he infers the “non-existence of those Towers during the remote ages of bardic influence,”--“and of their being utterly unknown to them, and to our ancestors, anterior to the reception of the Christian faith.” His third proposition is, that as “Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, Diodorus Siculus, and other writers of antiquity, have represented the condition of Ireland and its inhabitants to be barbarous in _their_ days,--in common with their neighbours the Britons, Gauls, and Germans, to whom the art systematically to manufacture stone had been unknown,--_ergo_, those _barbarians_ could not be set up as the authors of the Pillar Tower.” His fourth premise is, that “wherever we chance to light upon a cromleach, we seldom fail to find near it one of those miserable caves”--and which he has described before as “surpassing in dreariness everything in the imagination of man”;--whereas in the vicinity of the Pillar Tower no such thing is seen, _unless some natural_ or _accidental excavation_ may happen to exist _unaccountably_ in that direction. His inference from which is, that “although the cromleach and the cave do claim, the first a Celtic, the second a Phœnician origin, and happen _here_ to be united, the Pillar Tower, nevertheless, disavows even the most distant connection with either of them.” His fifth is a continuation of the foregoing, with an erroneous parallelism, viz. “at Bael Heremon, in India, not far from Mount Lebanon, there stood a temple dedicated to Bael, near to which were many caves, of which one was roomy enough to admit into it four thousand persons.” “The size of those temples,” he adds, “was regulated according to the extent or amount of the local population, being spacious and magnificent in large cities, and small and simple in the inferior towns and villages; but nowhere, nor in any case, do we meet an example of a lofty spiral tower, _internally too confined_ to admit _into it at once a dozen bulky persons_, denominated a temple.”