(Pp. 356-367)
The round towers and crosses at Clonmacnoise, Clondalkin, and elsewhere, abound in sculptured devices of a similar character, there being in all a manifest reference to Buddhist, or Eastern, ceremonial; whilst the representation of a dog (an animal esteemed sacred by the Tuath-de-danaans) on one of the crosses at Clonmacnoise seems to exclude the possibility of its relation to Christianity. But perhaps the most significant feature of these sculptures is the profusion of snake ornamentation, pointing to a time when that form of Sabaism known as “serpent-worship” was in the ascendant. The frequency of this emblemism was so obnoxious to the early Christian missionaries, on account of the evident reverence with which it was regarded by the Irish, that St. Patrick thought it advisable to efface it when practicable; and in this sense he may be entitled to the credit of having banished snakes from Ireland.
(Pp. 368-395)
Reverting to his proper subject of the origin and purpose of the round towers, our author examines the evidence bearing on the date of their erection. The Ulster Annals record the destruction of fifty-seven of these towers by an earthquake in A.D. 448, the natural inference being that they must have existed before the fifth century, but how long before is matter of conjecture. Tradition connects them with a personage styled the Goban Saer (Freemason Sage); but this title being the name of a class, not of an individual, and having no settled place in chronology, does not further the solution of the difficulty. A better clue is found in the name of the place whereon was fought the first decisive battle between the Tuath-de-danaan invaders and the Celtic (Firbolg) inhabitants, which gave the supremacy of the island to the former. From the number of commemorative towers erected there by the conquerors, this came to be known as Moytura (in Irish, Moye-tureadh, i.e. “the field of the towers”); and as the date of the second battle, fought centuries later, is approximately B.C. 600 (p. 449), there is reason for assigning the erection of round towers to a period long preceding that of Christianity. The ascription of these towers to the Tuath-de-danaans is in a degree warranted by the fact that the word “Tuathan-Tower” is a well-known Irish expression, and that there seems to be no other word in the language which conveys the same idea.
(Pp. 396-411)
The identity of Ireland with the Insula Hyperboreorum is deduced from a description of the latter, copied by Diodorus Siculus from the writings of Hecatæus and from a compendium by Marcianus Herocleotes of the works of Artemidorus. Both Hecatæus and Artemidorus lived before the Christian era, and an allusion in the latter author to certain “round temples,” of which the officiating priests were called Boreades, that existed in “Juvernia, a British isle, bounded on the north by the ocean called the Hyperborean, but on the east by the ocean called the Hibernian,” coupled with the fact that (with the exception of those at Brechin and Abernethy) no remains of round temples are found in any of the British Isles save Ireland,[28] goes far to prove the identity in question, also the pre-Christian antiquity of the round towers, together with the existence of an exceptional, and therefore by natural inference an imported, civilisation in that island. The latter inference is strengthened by continually-recurring traces of the great proficiency of its inhabitants in the fine, or useful, arts at an era when the adjacent islands were still plunged in barbarism.