Our readers need not fear being treated under the title German Story," to any of Grimm's Märchen, as yet translated. Those and Andersen's versions of them (not always an improvement on the original) are too well known to be admitted into our repertory. The story just told is from a collection by F. H. Van der Hagen, Prenzlau (Prussian States), 1824. Of other collections we shall speak at the proper opportunity. Probably the best issue of the gathering made by the brothers Grimm is that of the second edition, Berlin, 1822. The fifth edition appeared in Gottingen, in two vols., 1843, and the sixth in 1850. The amount of literary labour done by Jacob Ludwig Grimm and his brother, Wilhelm Karl, is astonishing. The first was born 4th January, 1785, and died on 20th September, 1863. William Charles was born on 24th February, 1786, and died in December, 1859. Jacob, besides filling diplomatic and other situations, hinting to German princes some defects in their political systems, and losing their favour in consequence, found time in co-operation with his brother to publish the following works, which, with regard to minuteness, fulness, and care, cannot be surpassed. A German Grammar, 1819, 1840, is so comprehensive that the vowels and consonants alone take up 600 pages. It embraces all the German dialects, ancient and modern. "Antiquities of German Law," was published at Gottingen in 1828. German Mythology," same place,

1835, left nothing connected with its subject matter unexplained. The same may be said of the "History of the German Language," Leipzig, 1848. His work on the "Origin of Speech" was published in Berlin, 1852. The German Dictionary,commenced in 1852, had not got beyond the letter F in 1862. Of all these important and useful works, each in its way, the only nonsensical and trivial one (in appearance) is that which has attained a world-wide reputation. Far be it from us to detract from their merits as works of reference; but let us reflect on the small number of scholars outside of German universities who have conscientiously spelled through the 600 pages, all treating of nothing but German vowels and consonants. The very idea of that portion of the dictionary (six letters only) which occupied ten years to complete is painful and distracting. Meantime the value of the VolksMärchen can scarcely be over-rated. They have pleasantly and healthily occupied the minds of unnumbered numbers of the young, and many of the old for many hours in each one's life to the exclusion of bad thoughts, bad books, or bad conversation, and they have induced thinking people to the study of the old Teuton myths of which many of them are corruptions. This has further led to the study of the condition of our ancestors in prehistoric times, and thus given much aid in a most interesting and curious investigation.

THE ROUND TOWERS.

OUR readers are requested not to place within this century the epoch when our island enjoyed its youth. Even before the building of Solomon's temple Ireland could scarcely be called young. The Milesian Scots were then in possession of the land, and the Danaan sages tolerated among them, for the sake of their learning, and the instruction they afforded their conquerors' children, held them attentive many a long evening, relating the travels and voyages of the various

colonies that had inhabited the island from a short time after the separation at Babel, the retrospect extending back through a perspective of upwards of a thousand years. Mr. Marcus Keane, and a considerable section of Gaelic archæologists with him, are convinced that our Round Towers, and some temples, generally supposed to have been built for Christian worship, were raised by these Danaans, at a period which, when set side by side with our year of grace, 1843, may surely claim the epithet, young.

Young indeed, and vigorous, and hopeful, and far-seeing, were the spirits of the mighty men of old, who projected and partly accomplished Babel, and laid the high and massive walls of Babylon, and reared the pyramids, and the mighty temple of Thebes, with its avenue of gigantic Sphynxes, and the monolythic temple at Sais, and left at our own doors the great stone circles, and the great avenue of standing stones at Karnac, in Brittany. Not inferior in skill, and resources, and strength, were the rare workers among the predecessors of the Scotic Gael, if, as Mr. Keane is heartily persuaded, they launched into the air our graceful and strong and still enduring towers. Let any calculating philosopher endeavour to get a mental grasp of the millions on millions of years it would require of Dr. Darwin's oyster, or Horace's two savages fighting for roots, to fit them for these undertakings; if he does he will experience a dazed and distracted state of mind, brought on by the useless attempt.

Mr. Keane, zealous for the skill and civilisation of the ante-Scotic colonies in our island, is not disturbed by such insane mental efforts. Abundant knowledge was obtained by the Post-Diluvians from their great ancestor, Noah, whose father had been and conversed with Adam. Some of the most stupendous piles reared in the dawn of the world's history were the work of the descendants of that unhappy son of Noah who inherited his curse, and it is the conviction of Mr. Keane that the builders of our towers belonged to that family, called Cuthites, from Cush, son of Cham, and father of Mizraim, the earliest king of Egypt on record. For our own parts we see no reason why the Danaans, who were obliged to give way to the Scots, should not be left in possession of the ancestors appropriated to them by Keating and our other old historians-viz., the Japhetians. But we shall not dwell in this place on points of difference, but bring forward Mr. Keane's arguments and illustrations in support of the Pagan origin of these long-enduring and mysterious piles :

"Buildings answering to the descriptions of our Round Towers," he remarks, "have been noticed as existing in every part of the world, but everywhere despised, and

to a great extent unused-the memorials of a race whose name and religion have been lost and forgotten. The specimens of such towers to be met with in Eastern Europe and Asia are comparatively few and far between, because the conquerors of the race for whose religion they were erected left no vestige of the towers or the other temples of their predecessors except such indestructible rock-temples as defied their power to destroy. The circumstances of Ireland in this respect were different. The Celts (Milesians) who conquered the Cuthites, raised no stone buildings of their own, either for temples or palaces, and they seem to have utterly despised the stone-works of their predecessors, and so allowed them to remain. In later times, their superstitious reverence for these remains was the means

of preserving them to this day. The English and Scotch plantation farmers having neither superstition (?) nor a taste for archæology, have caused much destruction among the Irish ruins wherever they have settled, and in some cases have removed all vestiges of them, leaving only the names to mark the sites of ancient ecclesiastical es

tablishments.

of Ireland seem to me to be cromlechs for the "The only unquestionably Celtic remains worship of the sun in the open air. Some circular mounds known by the names Cahir or Liss, probably used for the occasional protection of their cattle, and the erections called bee-hive huts, found near the seacoasts, where timber, the ordinary building material, could not be procured. To the exceptional character of the conquerors temples of the conquered have been permitted to remain for 3,000 years to puzzle archeologists of the nineteenth century."

then we are indebted for the fact that the

A considerable section of archæologists look on the cromlechs as marking the burial places of heroes. The lioses or cathairs were merely mounds enclosing spaces for the erection of wooden buildings. Our bawns are the modern representatives of the ancient cow-enclosures, bo, COW (buin, genitive case), forming the root of the word.

Mr. Keane has furnished upwards of thirty charming wood-cuts of the towers, their bases, their entrances, their windows, and were we young and beset with small worldly trouble, we could sit down and copy every one of them with pen and ink, such fine relief is given by the dark recess of door or window, and such nice opportunity for hatching, afforded by the interstices of the stones! Some of the doorways have the Norman arch, some are covered by one ponderous slab,

Cut stone (ashlar) work, with two or three round ribs, form the jambs and copings of some, and some bases present irregular cyclopean junctions, which, as everyone knows, conduce to strength much more than regular layers of masonry. In all the entrances there is a slight inclination of the jambs to each other, as they rise. The strength of these buildings, especially those of the irregular cyclopean layers at bottom, was immense. Mr. Keane mentions the tower of Kilmacduagh, in Clare, as having been struck by lightning, and thus thrown two feet out of the perpendicular. A Clare gentleman has informed us that, Ireton, when coming by that way from Gort, tried the effect of three cannon shots on the old sun-temple, with the effect above quoted. It was the ill-luck of Cromwell's son-in-law not to have had the privilege of availing himself of the labours of any O'Brien, or O'Halloran, or Petrie, or Keane, of his day. Let his vandalism be overlooked.

Fig. 164 presents the fluted Round Tower found by Hanway near Asterabad in Persia.

"Fig. 165 represents a Round Tower in Hindoostan described by Lord Valentia. He says of such buildings: It is singular that there is no tradition concerning them, nor are they held in any respect by the Hindoos of this country. In this latter particular as well as in their general form, and their not having the doorway on the ground level, they resemble our Irish Round Towers.'"

This building has several belts round it on a lighter ground, large openings towards the top, and just under the conical cap, a parapet from behind which a fine view might be enjoyed.

Fig. 166 represents the Round Tower of Allyghur, East Indies, injured towards the top, but strikingly like the Irish structures. The name of the locality is Coel, which if cognate with Gaelic, would imply a wood or lonesome place. We are ignorant of the description Captain Smith, 44th Regiment, gives of the neighbourhood.

Fig. 166 is taken from Markham's travels in Peru, and presents a tower 36 feet high, and crowned with a stone beehive-like-dome overlapping the wallplate. The layers are irregular, and have the cyclopean jointing.

Fig.168 is borrowed from Stephens's "Central America, "the beehive covering being rather higher than the main body. The height is about 30 feet, the wall five feet thick, and within is a cylindrical solid stone with a vacancy of three feet between it and the wall.

In another structure of the same kind in the same place, four doors placed at the cardinal points admitted to a corridor five feet wide, and in its inner wall were four more doors placed diagonally with the outer ones. These led into an inner corridor four feet wide, in the centre of which was a solid cylinder of stone.

There is a Round Tower on the Bank of the Terek, a river which falls into the Caspian sea on the west side, the door being twelve feet above the soil. Delhi has its beautiful, tapering polygonal Tower; others are at Ghuznce. Henry Maundrel in his journey from Aleppo found a monolyth, round-tower-shaped, and thirty feet high, near the sea-coast, and a little south of Aradus. There was another about the same height, and only ten yards distant, and under both were found large chambers, cut out of the rock, with smaller enclosures, apparently for the reception of dead bodies, attached to them.

Lucian makes mention of a circular tall temple at Hieropolis, connected with the worship of Astarte. A priest climbed up this tower once a year, and remained in an uncomfortable position near the summit for seven days. The faithful crowded round the base, and offered presents. These and their donors were shouted to the man at the top, and he from his "bad eminence" uttered a prayer for the generous worshipper, and then rung a bell further to trumpet the good man's fame, and excite imitation.

At Mycone in Greece are the remains of a conical building, with ledges and brackets on the inner surface of the wall for the support of lofts and statues.

A few structures of the kind existing on the Continent and attached to establishments founded by Irish missionaries, were probably erected by these zealous men out of a yearning after the old piles near the little churches where they had in their youth offered up their devotions.

If the Milesians at first despised and neglected these pillar temples or fortresses of the Danaans, it is more than probable that in aftertimes they used them for places of retreat, when unable to meet more powerful encroachers in the open field. Taking their strength and the height of the entrances from the ground into account they must be looked on as impregnable. This use and the reverence increasing with time of the magic skill of the old Danaans, must have left among the Milesian Scots at the time of their conversion to Christianity a great respect and attachment to the piles, and the missioners apprehended no evil but much good from the erection of their simply-constructed churches by their sides or in their close neighbourhood. In expectation of an attack from neighbouring foe or foreign Dane, the religious community, the sacred vessels of the Church, and the helpless women and children, and the aged, had a sure asylum in the protecting tower. Mr. Palgrave, in his late travels across Arabia found, only the other day, strong towers in sundry Arab villages or little towns used for the selfsame purpose.

So, instead of one purpose it would be easy to discover three or four for our conical enigmas. One of the objects of their builders was most probably a quasi-religious one. We dare not deny some astronomical knowledge to those remote ancestors, and the apertures at the top generally facing the four cardinal points, were just what an earnest star-gazer would desire. He probably had fine strings crossing each other within, and by their means could track the passage of moon, star, or planet across the field of his wicket. Besides these uses, the lofty windows afforded the means of examining the surrounding country, and detecting the approach of an enemy while still at a considerable distance.

Mr. Keane accounts for the absence of Round Towers in France and Britain, if they ever existed in this lastnamed country, by supposing that the stone-building Romans took them down, and used the materials in piles reared by themselves. They escaped destruction in Ireland, as the Scots, using only wooden structures within their circular moats and mounds,

Our

could not convert them to use. own opinion, for which we claim only moderate attention, is that the poetry and romance and reverence inherent in the Gaelic temperament would excite respect for the relics of the skilful and wise people rather than a mischievous impulse to destroy them. In concluding this portion of our subject, we incidentally remark that the only tower mentioned in our trustworthy annals as having been built within Christian times was that erected at Tomgreany (Tuam, mound, tomb, fortress; Greine, gen. case of Grian, the sun) in Clare. Of this there does not remain a stone standing on a stone. The Danaans were our masters in masonry.

EARLY CHURCHES.

Mr. Keane, not content with appropriating the honour of the "Celestial Indexes" to his beloved Cuthites-our Danaans, shows that the best of our ecclesiastical structures, or at least some portions of them, were originally reared by the same people in honour of their divinities. We shall lay before our readers his reasons for holding this opinion. The examples and proofs given are well calculated to excite interest even where they fail to convince. To support his propositions that "The Irish Celts were not builders in stone before the twelfth century, he calls upon the evidence of John Henry Parker (Gentleman's Magazine, 1864, 1865.)

"The earlier churches of modern Europe were generally of wood. It was not until the eleventh century that churches were built of stone. The building entirely of ashlar or cut stone was not anywhere attained until the twelfth century. The other European nations copied the older buildings of the Romans, but Roman civilization never penetrated to Ireland. The Irish had no Roman buildings to copy as the other European nations had (Jan. 1864).

"After the Conquest the English brought with them their own laws, their own arts.

They erected buildings in the style of their own country, modified by having to employ native workmen, and by the material they had to work in; and in general, buildings in the same style are later in date in Ireland than in England.”

After mentioning the palace of smooth wattles built for Henry II. in Dublin, he notices the castle built by the English at Clonmacnois, its very rough workmanship, the absence of