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Qtoam QXe&'e &pitatf. By SIR J. MORRIS-JONES, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Welsh at the University College of North Wales. THE inscribed brass in Usk Church, although it contains the name of "Adam vske in plain letters, was not until 1885 guessed to be the epitaph of the (now) well-known chronicler of course, the authors of the early attempts at interpreting it had never heard of the egregious old Adam. Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, in the introduction to his second (the first complete) edition of Chronicon Adce de Usk, 1904, p. xxxi, observes that" This brass has been for generations a puzzle to antiquaries and philologists He proceeds to give a brief account of the attempted solutions In 1773, a notice of it, accompanied by a very imperfect facsimile, appeared in Archaeologia, vol. ij, in a paper on the Julia Strata communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by the Reverend William Harris, who quotes an interpretation by Dr. Wotton which discovers in the inscription the epitaph of a certain Solomon the Astrologer connected with a school of philosophers well skilled in astronomy and all other sciences and established at Caerleon ar Wysk before the coming of the Saxons. Knowing our Adam as well as we do, this solution of the riddle is irresistibly ludicrous. Gough, in his edition of Camden's Britannia (1789), vol. ij. p. 487, repeats Archaeologia. In 1801 Coxe, in his Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, p. 418, gave a better facsimile and quoted previous interpretations, also adding others. Next, the Cambrian Archaeological Association turned its attention to the brass and printed further observations in the Archaeologia Cambrensis, vol. ij. (1847) p. 34; and finally, in 1885, it was again before the Association (A7'ch. Cambr., 5th series, vol. ij. p. 344), when Canon (now Archdeacon) Thomas claimed it as the epitaph of our chronicler. The only previous interpretation quoted by Coxe,