There is undoubtedly a charm in the thought that all over the Continent of Europe, in the libraries of many of its romantic cities and towns, there are scores of mss., some of them upwards of a thousand years old, fugitives in the early times from these much harassed islands; and that European scholars of the highest erudition, such as Zeuss, Ebel, N igra, Ascoli, Windisch, Zimmer, and Whitley Stokes have been profoundly interested in these literary relics, and have devoted much of their time to the work of studying, translating, elucidating, and editing the Gaelic texts or glosses found in them. To-day the number of those engaged in similar research at home and abroad is vastly on the increase, and augurs well for the future of this department of knowledge.