There can be no doubt that a high degree of cultivation, and considerable advancement in science, had been attained by the more immediate descendants of our first parents.

Navigation and commerce existed, and Ireland may have been colonized.

The sons of Noah must have remembered and preserved the traditions of their ancestors, and transmitted them to their descendants.

Hence, it depended on the relative anxiety of these descendants to preserve the history of the world before the Flood, how much posterity should know of it.

MacFirbis thus answers the objections of those who, even in his day, questioned the possibility of preserving such records:--"If there be any one who shall ask who preserved the history [_Seanchus_], let him know that they were very ancient and long-lived old men, recording elders of great age, whom God permitted to preserve and hand down the history of Erinn, in books, in succession, one after another, from the Deluge to the time of St.Patrick." The artificial state of society in our own age, has probably acted disadvantageously on our literary researches, if not on our moral character.