The people seem to have been, in very early times, great feeders of sheep, cattle, and pigs. But the richness of the soil of this beautiful island yields to the labor of the scientific former great gain.
Very curious speculations have arisen as to the gold that has been found in Ireland. It remains a mystery. Mr. O'Connor, in his dissertations on the history of Ireland, says, "that, soon after the arrival of the Scots from Spain, we read of Uchadan of Cuala, who rendered himself famous by his skill in the fabrication of metals." This places the civilization of Ireland very far back; and taken together with the early renown of the Irish in music, puts them at once in a [{544}] position of their own. When a people are musicians and workers in gold, Silver, and other metals, they have advanced a good way in what is meant by the word civilization. Their music is described as being of the most affecting and tender kind; and they seem to have met together, as afterward at Tara, for such accomplished recreations before anything of that kind would have been understood in England.
It will be interesting to give, from "Gough's Additions" to Camden's account of Ireland, some notes of the buried gold that has been found:
"In the bog near Cullen, in the county of Tipperary, in 1732, a laborer found a piece of worked gold, a little less than half the size of a small egg. It weighed 3 ozs. 4 dwts. and 7 grs."
"In 1739, a boy found a circular plate of beaten gold, about eight inches in diameter, which, lapped up in the form of a triangle, enclosed three ingots of gold, which they say could not weigh less than a pound; for the boy no sooner brought them home than his mother, a poor widow, gave them to a merchant, on whose land she had a cabin, as brass to make weights."
This is one of the great many instances in which large pieces of gold were sold as brass. Gold was found in these lumps, and in thin plates, as follows:
"1742. A child found on the brink of a hole a thin plate of gold. 1747. A girl found in the turf-dust a thin plate of gold, rolled on another, which when extended was 14 inches long, and a quarter of an inch broad; of which a fellow standing by took about half from her; what he left weighed 6 dwts. 13 grs. Soon after, an apprentice girl found 1 oz. 5 dwts. of the same kind, rolled after the same manner, in a sod of turf as she made the fire."
Vessels of a "yellow metal," as the people said, were frequently found in this bog. They used to sell them for brass. One was four-sided, and 8 inches high, with a handle on each side; the sisters who possessed it sold it to a tinker, who mended a pot and gave thirteenpence for it. The page of Irish history which the sight of these vessels, and the consideration of their shape and workmanship, might have revealed, has been, doubtless, lost with them in the melting pot.