entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the
meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional
reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the
memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in
place names or is entirely lost.

There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one
hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have
Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the
saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in
Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and
of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one
of these is in two recensions.

The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great classes--
the Latin Lives and the Irish,--written in Latin and Irish respectively.
We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life only of others,
and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish. It may be
necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin by
Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives. Whether
the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives or the
Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a large
extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.) seems to
favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here however
leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into the
matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the
theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well
known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to
which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and Latin.