Those writers are greatly mistaken, he says, who describe the Icelandic sea as always frozen, and who say that there is day there from spring to autumn and from autumn to spring, for the Irish monks sailed thither through the open sea in a month of great natural cold, and yet found alternate day and night, except about the period of the summer solstice. He also describes the Faroe Isles:—

"A certain trustworthy monk told me that he reached one of them by sailing for two summer days and one night in a vessel with two benches of rowers.... In these islands for almost a hundred years there dwelt hermits who sailed there from our own Ireland [nostra Scottia], but now they are once more deserted as they were at the beginning, on account of the ravages of the Norman pirates."

This is proof positive that the Irish discovered and inhabited Iceland and the Faroe Islands half a century or a century before the Northmen. Dicuil was distinguished as a grammarian, metrician, and astronomer,[15] but his geographical treatise, written in his old age, is the most interesting and valuable of his achievements.

Fergil, or Virgilius, as he is usually called, was another great Irish geometer, who eventually became Archbishop of Salzburg and died in 785. He taught the sphericity of the earth and the doctrine of the Antipodes, a truth which seems also to have been familiar to Dicuil. St. Boniface, afterwards Archbishop of Mentz, evidently distorting his doctrine, accused him to the Pope of heresy in teaching that there was another world and other men under the earth, and another sun and moon. "Concerning this charge of false doctrine, if it shall be established," said the Pope, "that Virgil taught this perverse and wicked doctrine against God and his own soul, do you then convoke a council, degrade him from the priesthood, and drive him from the Church." Virgil, however, seems to have satisfactorily explained his position, for nothing was done against him.

These instances help to throw some light upon a most difficult subject—the training given in the early Irish Christian schools, and the cause of their undoubted popularity for three centuries and more amongst the scholars of Western Europe.

[1] Here are a few lines from the well-known Adonic poem which he, at the age of 68, addressed to his friend Fedolius—

"Extitit ingensImpia quippe
Causa malorumPygmalionis
Aurea pellis,Regis ob aurum
Corruit auriGesta leguntur.
Munere parvo * * * * *
Cœna Deorum.
Ac tribus illisFœmina sœpe
Maxima lis estPerdit ob aurum
Orta Deabus.Casta pudorem.
Hinc populavitNon Jovis auri
TrogugenarumFluxit in imbre
Ditia regnaSed quod adulter
Dorica pubes.Obtulit aurum
Juraque legumAureus ille
Fasque fides que Fingitur imber."
Rumpitur aure.

Dr. Sigerson in "Bards of the Gael and Gaul," p. 407, prints as Jubainville also does, the whole of this noted poem, and points out that it is shot through and through with Irish assonance. "Not less important than its assonance," writes Dr. Sigerson, "is the fact that it introduces into Latin verse the use of returning words, or burthens with variations, which supply the vital germs of the rondeau and the ballad." I am not myself convinced of what Dr. Sigerson considers marks of intentional assonance in almost every line.

His chief remaining works are a Monastic Rule in ten chapters; a book on the daily penances of the monks; seventeen sermons; a book on the measure of penances; a treatise on the eight principal vices; five epistles written to Gregory the Great and others; and a good many Latin verses. His life is written by the Abbot Jonas, a contemporary of his own.