Who are the Irish?

Abstract

THIS little work is issued as the first of a series on “Our Nationalities,”to be followed by three others on the Scotch, Welsh, and English. It does not appear from the prospectus whether the rest of th series is to be entrusted to Mr. Bonwick; but if they are it is to be hoped that he will qualify himself for the task by a preliminary study of at least the first principles of ethnology. The present volume, with all its good intentions and praiseworthy industry, must be regarded as a hopeless failure, owing entirely to the neglect of this necessary precaution. For many years ethnology, anthropology, and philology were subjects which any one seemed competent to deal with, who had got hold of a few lists of words in some obscure African or Polynesian dialects (the obscurer the better), or who had desecrated a sufficient number of ancient barrows, or posed to admiring circles under the shadow of some Druid's altar in Cornwall or Brittany. But those halcyon days of the amateur ethnologist are no more, though the writer, unfortunately, seems scarcely alive to the fact. Almost every page of his little tractate betrays solecisms and crudities, such as one naturally looks for in the writings of the Pinkertons, Vallanceys, Vans Kennedys, Bethams, and other obsolete writers of the old Keltic school, but which have become anachronisms since Keltic studies have been placed on a solid basis by the labours of Pritchard, Pictet, Zeuss, Ebel, Lottner, Diefenbach, Whitley Stokes, and Dr. W. K. Sullivan.

Who are the Irish?

By James Bonwick (London: David Bogue, 1880.)