1895- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 147 



these numbers, as Culverwell shows, have little or nothing to do with 

 the subject. It would greatly enhance the value of perusal of 

 the work among the class of readers who are influenced by it, if the 

 publishers would print a note on the title page recommending that 

 all passages containing the numbers 37 or 63 should be skipped. The 

 misleading use Sir Robert makes of these numbers may be judged from 

 his sensational description of their influence on climate. Thus he 

 describes how the 63 measures of heat are poured in like a torrent in 

 a hot summer of 166 days, while the 37 measures of heat are dragged 

 out over the whole of the long winter of 199 days. This unfair 

 division of heat, he says, brings about " a climate of appalling severity 

 — an Ice Age in fact." But, as Mr. Culverwell points out, Dublin has 

 a climate with a far more unequal division of heat than this, for there 22 

 measures of heat, instead of 37, have to do for the 199 days. In fact, 

 to find a climate of the "appalling severity" of that described we 

 have to go as far south as Madrid or Constantinople. Mr. Culverwell 

 concludes his paper with a theory of his own, explaining the cause of 

 Ice Ages as due to an increase in the amount of the earth's atmosphere. 

 Whether this theory be accepted or not, Mr. Culverwell has certainly 

 earned the gratitude of geologists by his complete exposure of the 

 general weakness of the astronomical theory, and its special weakness 

 as set forth in the rhetorical pages of Sir Robert Ball. 



The Origin of the Irish Fauna. 



A recent short paper on this subject by Dr. R. F. Scharff {Pvoc. 

 R. Irish Acdemy (3), vol. iii., pp. 479-485) will be read with interest 

 by both zoologists and geologists. The author does not explain the 

 peculiarities of the Irish fauna by suggesting a direct ancient land- 

 connection with the Spanish peninsula, nor does he believe that the 

 entire animal population of the sister island has migrated thither 

 from Great Britain by a post-glacial land-connection. His conclusions, 

 based mainly upon the distribution of living and extinct mammals, 

 freshwater fishes, and terrestrial molluscs, are that in Pliocene times 

 Ireland was connected with Wales- in the south, and with Scotland in 

 the north, a freshwater lake occupying the central area of the Irish 

 Sea. The southern connection is believed to have broken down in 

 early Pleistocene times, and the northern soon afterwards. Those 

 species which, though found in Great Britain, are absent from Ireland 

 are supposed to have entered the latter country after these isthmuses 

 had been severed. The distribution of the lake fishes, of the genus 

 Coregonus — in Ireland, southern Scotland, Cumberland, and North 

 Wales — is the main evidence adduced in support of the Pliocene 

 lake on the site of Irish Sea. 



The most startling conclusion of the paper is that the entire 

 Irish fauna is of pre-glacial origin. Those geologists who believe that 

 the country was buried beneath an ice-sheet, hundreds of feet thick, 



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