organic structures do occur in such and such animals, would take the place of the statement that they must occur in accordance with some presupposed theory, and thus true knowledge would increase, and there would be no need for imagination to supply the deficiencies of observation.

We must not conclude this article without a few words of hearty congratulation to the veteran French translator of Aristotle's works, M. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire. The Histoire des Animaux d'Aristote,' in three handsome, wellprinted volumes, his latest translation, appears to be exceedingly well done; it accurately represents the Greek, and is accompanied by copious useful footnotes, and an exhaustive index, and although we cannot share with him his almost unqualified praise of Aristotle as a writer of natural history, and fail to see such an unheard-of multi'plicity of facts observed with so much exactness' as he has discovered, we are glad to bear witness to the great merit of his translation. It is a valuable addition to Aristotelian literature, and will, we think, add fresh lustre to the honoured name of Saint-Hilaire.

*We could wish that the footnotes sometimes contained more definite zoological information. We turn to M. Saint-Hilaire's note on the mole (άonáλak). He does not tell us whether Aristotle's animal is the insectivorous Talpa or the rodent mole-rat (Spalax typhus). The correctness of Aristotle depends on this question. If he is speaking of the common mole he is wrong when he says 'it has no 'apparent eyes, being covered with skin,' for, as Sir Thomas Browne remarks, that moles have eyes in their head is manifested unto any one that wants them not in his own.' If Aristotle is speaking of the Spalax, or mole-rat, he is quite right, for this creature's eyes are covered with the skin. Fortunately there is one word in Aristotle's account which settles the question, viz. xavλiódovraç (Hist. An. iv. 8,§2) spoken of the teeth. This word is frequent in Aristotle's zoological treatises, and refers to the prominent teeth of certain creatures, as the tusks of the elephant and wild-boar. Now the teeth of the Spalax are long, conspicuous, and chisel-shaped, and may well be called xavλióδοντες. MM. Aubert and Wimmer think this passage containing a notice of the brain channels (ópot revpwdɛiç) is a later interpolation. If it be so, it shows that the interpolator had interpreted Aristotle's animal as the Spalax, and not the insectivorous Talpa, but the question as to what special animals are denoted in Greek and Latin authors generally by the words ἀσπάλαξ, σπάλαξ, and talpa, opens out a subject too wide for present discussion.

ART. VII.-1. Ireland in the Seventeenth Century; or, the Irish Massacres of 1641-2. Their Causes and Results. By MARY HICKSON. With a Preface by J. A. FROUDE, M.A. Vols. I. and II. London: 1884.

2. Cromwell in Ireland; a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. By the Rev. DENIS MURPHY, S.J. With Maps, Plans, and Illustrations. Dublin: 1883.

IT T is impossible to deny that the misfortunes of Ireland during the last three centuries have been due less to the territorial greed or to the religious fanaticism of the English, than to the fact that more than once she deliberately imperilled our national existence by an alliance with our greatest enemies. When our Protestantism exposed us to the menacing schemes of Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century, and when even the Popes, as Döllinger significantly reminds us, strove by foreign invasion and civil war to break up that fabric of political independence which the Tudors had established in England, Ireland became a place of the first strategic importance to Spain. Then, in the struggle of the seventeenth century between Charles I. and his Parliament, the Irish took advantage of our divisions to strike a blow for their independence, which threatened to place us at the mercy of a despotic monarchy. It was not merely that an Irish army was raised to make war upon England in the interest of Charles I.- that army which,' as Pym said, 'was to bring us to a better order'-but that the outbreak of 1641, followed by ten years of anarchy, threatened the very existence of the Empire. Then, when a fresh effort was made to sacrifice our liberties forty years after, the Irish again flung themselves across our path, with France as an ally instead of Spain, only to involve themselves in still deeper misfortunes. This ended the long struggle between freedom and authority in England. Now it is a very easy task for historians to denounce the severities of English rule at periods so tremendously critical in our history; but it is an act of the most flagrant injustice to ignore all those circumstances in our position which tended to palliate, if they could not justify, the extreme and terrible rigour of our treatment of Ireland. We frankly acknowledge that the course of events having made it so perfectly clear that the possession of Ireland, not to say her cordial support, was indispensable to our safety, we ought to have recognised the duty of governing the country henceforth in

the interests of its people, respecting the rights of conscience and of property, and anticipating by a century the benefits of that union which was sought at last, like the earlier union with Scotland, as a great political necessity for both countries. History tells how a very different course was taken, and is not altogether silent respecting its cause. If the Revolution, which established the liberties of England, unhappily prepared the way for the ascendency of a Protestant oligarchy over a Catholic nation, humiliated by a long succession of defeats, crushed into absolute helplessness, without institutions or property to defend, with nothing but injuries to redress and wrongs to avenge, the cause is to be found, not in the circumstances of this last contest at all, but in the events of the terrible autumn and winter of 1641-2. If there is any truth in history, what Mirabeau said prophetically of the French Revolution was true in a sense of Ireland: 'You will have massacres; you will have 'butcheries; you will not have the execrable honour of a 'civil war.'

Now it ought not to be difficult to ascertain the actual facts of the Irish rebellion any more than of the incidents of the contemporary struggle in England, because there is no lack of evidence supplied by the actors, the sufferers, or the spectators, in the bloody conflict. But the very greatness of the interest involved in the contest has helped to deface, and even to falsify, the record, and to make impartiality so difficult that the history of events which we could all wish to bury in oblivion has become rather an incentive to fresh atrocities than a warning against them. The question in hand is to be settled by the laws of historical evidence, applied without prejudice or passion to the facts contained in contemporary chronicles, memoirs, and judicial records, with a due discrimination of their respective values. We must put altogether aside those imaginative sympathies which reject the severe truths of history. Believing as we do that truth is the only merit which gives dignity and worth to history, we look to it for a real picture of the rebellion of 1641 in colours that cannot deceive us. The subject is not of our seeking, but is forced upon us by the efforts of writers who are now trying to pervert the whole history of the relations between England and Ireland, so as to find in it new sources of exasperation to keep the two nations for ever apart. English writers have not, as a rule, been careful to vindicate the truth against fiction and im

posture. Mr. Froude, who writes a preface to the work which is placed at the head of this article, says truly:

'The confidence with which the innocence of the Irish of any such crimes is now insisted upon has been the growth of time; of the unwillingness of the English to keep alive painful memories when they trusted and hoped it was needless to do so, because ancient enmities between classes and creeds and the two islands were fast dying out; and also of a consciousness on the part of the English that they have much to repent of in regard to Ireland, which has made them careless of defending themselves against particular charges.'

Yet, as he also remarks, the peculiarity of the case is, that the leading facts seem never to have been doubted or disputed for more than a century after the outbreak :

'The Irish Rebellion and Cromwell's re-conquest were not done in a corner. Catholic Europe, with the Pope at its head, was deeply interested in the struggle and the issue of it. The barbarities of which the Irish were accused, and were said to have been found guilty, were published to the world, and, involving as they did the character of a Catholic nation, it might have been expected their publication would have drawn forth at once an indignant contradiction. Hundreds of exiles, who had been in Ireland at the beginning of the insurrection, were scattered over France, Spain, and Italy, and might have repudiated, had they been able, the tremendous accusation against their countrymen. They did nothing of the kind. Individuals among them here and there, after a lapse of years, asserted that they had no share in the massacres at Portadown, at Shrule, at Silver Mines, Portnaw, Macroom, and other places; but it never seems to have occurred to them to deny the general fact. And no writer of credit, Catholic or Protestant, who had lived through the rebellion, thought of denying it. Not only Temple, Borlase, and Clarendon, but the Catholics Clanricarde and Castlehaven, Father Walsh the Franciscan friar, Philip O'Reilly of Crom Castle, Mr. Kearney the Catholic brother of a Catholic bishop, with other Irish Catholic writers of the seventeenth century (whose narratives are hereafter printed for the first time from the Carte MSS.), all admit that massacres were committed, however they may venture to palliate or excuse those crimes. The Rev. Charles O'Connor, D.D., a highly respected Roman Catholic priest of the last century, made the same admission.'

This is a tolerably complete account of the evidence, to which we must add the thirty-two volumes of manuscript depositions in Trinity College, Dublin. We accept the whole, subject to the single qualification that both Protestant and Catholic writers, and especially such of them as mingled in the events they describe, reflect more or less the passions and prejudices, the partialities and animosities to be expected under the circumstances. This remark applies equally to Protestant writers like Temple and Borlase, and

to many of their Catholic contemporaries. Now in what way have later writers dealt with this mass of evidence ? The earliest is Carte, the biographer of Ormonde, who had access to many original papers, now lost, which belonged to officers engaged in suppressing the rebellion. But Carte was bitterly anti-Puritan, and very favourable to the Roman Catholics because they were nominally fighting on the side of the Royalists. Leland, a Fellow of Dublin College, and author of a History of Ireland,' is, as Hallam says, a mere echo of Carte, but while hostile to the Presbyterians, he was less favourable than Carte to the Roman Catholics. Warner, another Dublin Fellow, wrote a History of the Irish 'Rebellion,' which merits the praise of Miss Hickson for its fairness and candour.' The Roman Catholics would have acted wisely to leave their cause in the hands of these three historians, but unhappily for themselves they assumed the responsibility of issuing a Roman Catholic version of the rebellion, which has done more than any other thing to discredit their character for veracity and candour. We refer to the work of Dr. John Curry, a Catholic physician of Dublin, which appeared about the time of the Irish Volunteers with the title of An Historical and Critical 6 Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland.' It was published at a time when the Roman Catholics were anxious to dissipate the old historic prejudices which had their origin in the wars of the seventeenth century, and when the Protestants were almost equally anxious that the past should be forgotten. The author maintains that in 1641 there was. nothing but a civil war in which the Irish fought for their lands and their religion, that there was no massacre, that the fiction of a massacre was invented by fraud and supported by perjured witnesses as a mere afterthought to justify the confiscation of the rebels' estates. There was massacre, no doubt, but it was done by the Protestants, and the innocent Catholics only took up arms in self-defence. Hallam justly stigmatises Curry's history as a tissue of misrepresentation and disingenuousness,' for it teaches the Irish Catholics to regard themselves as the victims of an atrocious conspiracy-a conspiracy to rob them of their lands and to justify it by blackening their reputation. Unhappily Curry has been almost implicitly followed for a hundred years past by nearly all Roman Catholic writers, and by a few Protestant writers of no great weight. The Catholic writers do not, as a rule, pretend to have investigated the history of the rebellion for themselves. They