Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
An Irish Materia Medica (Author: Tadhg Ó Cuinn)

subsection 2

National Library of Scotland, MacKinnon's MS III, fo. 1–80:

This is a fairly full copy of the text, containing 286 articles. It was made in the fifteenth century. The scribe gives his name as Gilla Coluim, and he indicates that he worked from the text as taken down by Gilla Padraic Ó Callanain from the author's dictation. Gilla Coluim does not indicate where the copy was made, but it has been in Scotland since at least the seventeenth century. The names of the plants are written in the margin in English, evidently by John Beaton, who wrote his name on folio 53b in 1671. On folio 85a he writes: E[oin] M'Bh[eathadh] 1671. MacKinnon, in his Catalogue of Gaelic MSS in Scotland, prints extracts from Articles in this manuscript corresponding to our Chapters 92, 158, 187 and 198, and he gives the scribe's colophon at the end of the text in full. It will be necessary to check the Glossary herein with John Beaton's English plant names.