the presidency of St. Laserian. Both parties at length
agreed to send deputies to Rome, as "children to their
mother," to learn her decision. Three years later, that
decision was made known, and the midland and southern
dioceses at once adopted it. The northern churches,
however, still held out, under the lead of Armagh and
the influence of Iona, nor was it till a century later
that this scandal of celebrating Easter on two different
days in the same church was entirely removed. In
justification of the Roman rule, St. Cummian, about the
middle of the seventh century, wrote his famous epistle
to Segenius, Abbot of Iona, of the ability and learning
of which all modern writers from Archbishop Usher to
Thomas Moore, speak in terms of the highest praise. It
is one of the few remaining documents of that controversy.
A less vital question of discipline arose about the
tonsure. The Irish shaved the head in a semicircle from
temple to temple, while the Latin usage was to shave the
crown, leaving an external circle of hair to typify the
crown of thorns. At the conference of Whitby (A.D. 664)
this was one of the subjects of discussion between the
clergy of Iona, and those who followed the Roman method--but
it never assumed the importance of the Easter controversy.

In the following century an Irish Missionary, Virgilius,
of Saltzburgh, (called by his countrymen "Feargal, the
Geometer,") was maintaining in Germany against no less
an adversary than St. Boniface, the sphericity of the
earth and the existence of antipodes. His opponents
endeavoured to represent him, or really believed him to