Page:Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol XXXIII.djvu/574

 246 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Acadeviy. much injured by clamp as to appear almost a solid mass. By steeping it in cold water I was enabled to separate the membranes from each other, and by pressing each separately between blotting-paper, and frequentlj'' renewing the operation, at length succeeded in restoring what was not actually decayed to a legible state."' Wliat became of the parts which were " actually decayed," or whether they are represented by the still illegible portions of the Psalter, we are not told. But it is to l)e observed that the leaves which have suffered most are in the earlier part of the manuscript. As we go on we find less and less mutilation, and in the last twenty-seven leaves only eleven lines have wholly disappeared, some of these having been pruned away by the binder. If the losses had been due merely to causes operating after the Psalter was placed in its shrine, we should have expected the opening and closing leaves to be similarly affected. Moreover, the last page (f. 58^) is considerably rubbed, the result, no doulit, of contact with a hard substance for a long period. It is scarcely open to question, whether or not it has lost some of its earlier leaves since the eleventh century, that then as now its final leaf was f. 58. It was a fragment when its cumdach was made. It was also a dilapidated fragment, if I am not mistaken. The original size of the leaves cannot be accurately determined, but wherever the rulings can be measured we find that the vertical distance between the top and bottom rules of a page is 200 mm., and the horizontal distance between the left and right marginal rules 120 mm. The upper and lower margins are practically gone in all cases, and but little is left of the outer margins. The widest of the existing left-hand margins of the recto pages measures 16 mm., but everywhere the binder has cut away a considerable portion of the inner margins.^ We may safely assume, therefore, that the writing was surrounded ' My friend Professor Douglas Hyde, iu his " Literary History of Ireland," p. 175, omits Betliam's ' ' almost," and says the manuscript was " a mass of vellum stuck together and hardened into a single lump." He was, perhaps, unconsciously influenced by his recol- lection of the Domnadh Airgid Gospels (see Transactions R.I. A., xxx, 308). I conceive that much stress must be laid on the two words, "appeared almost," considering the success of Betham's somewhat crude "operation." Cp. above, p. 244, note ^. - The amount of injury which was thus done to the manuscript can to some extent be gauged. Someone, perhaps Betham, wrote a number on the recto — or what he supposed to be the recto — of each leaf, beginning with the last. Thus the leaves were numbered backwards, from 1 to 58. Up to f. 14 such of the numbers as remain are in the middle of the leaves, but after f . 14 they are written in the inner margin. Now, it is not likely that in most cases the number was written on the extreme edge of the vellum. But nearly one-third (13 out of 44) have been cut across by the binder, and four have entirely disappeared, probably cut off. Again, in the centre of one sheet there was a large hole, extending down three lines of text. The right-hand edge of this hole remains in f. 32,