One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte Liathmore)
requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of the Irish
into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or characteristic
Life, be a translation, we may perhaps assume that the others, or most
of them, are translations also. In any case we may assume as certain
that there were original Irish materials or data from which the formal
Lives (Irish or Latin) were compiled.

The Latin Lives are contained mainly in four great collections. The
first and probably the most important of these is in the Royal Library
at Brussels, included chiefly in a large MS. known as 'Codex
Salmanticensis' from the fact that it belonged in the seventeenth
century to the Irish College of Salamanca. The second collection is in
Marsh's Library, Dublin, and the third in Trinity College Library. The
two latter may for practical purposes be regarded as one, for they are
sister MSS.--copied from the same original. The Marsh's Library
collection is almost certainly, teste Plummer, the document referred to
by Colgan as Codex Kilkenniensis and it is quite certainly the Codex
Ardmachanus of Fleming. The fourth collection (or the third, if we take
as one the two last mentioned,) is in the Bodleian at Oxford amongst
what are known as the Rawlinson MSS. Of minor importance, for one
reason or another, are the collections of the Franciscan Library,
Merchants' Quay, Dublin, and in Maynooth College respectively. The
first of the enumerated collections was published 'in extenso,' about
twenty-five years since, by the Marquis of Bute, while recently the gist
of all the Latin collections has been edited with rare scholarship by
Rev. Charles Plummer of Oxford. Incidentally may be noted the one
defect in Mr. Plummer's great work--its author's almost irritating
insistence on pagan origins, nature myths, and heathen survivals.
Besides the Marquis of Bute and Plummer, Colgan and the Bollandists have