NOTES ON IRISH NATURAL HISTORY. 549 



On this cliff I first saw the red-legged crow, and watched 

 it feeding its young in the fissures of the inaccessible preci- 

 pice : compared with our crow, rook, or j ackdaw, it is a grace- 

 ful bird; its flight is easy and elegant, and its gait, when 

 perched, very pleasing. The hooded crow and raven are also 

 abundant here, and the latter wonderfully familiar. Ferns 

 were abundant; Asplenium marinum occurs in profusion, 

 and grows to a large size, but the fronds of the present year 

 were very immature, and those of last season beginning to 

 decay. In the basaltic cliff is a remarkable fissure, across 

 which a mass has fallen and forms a natural bridge ; through 

 this fissure is a foot-way called the ' Grey Man's Path,' lead- 

 ing under the bridge to the top of the cliff; this path is liter- 

 ally " strewed with flowers," and among them the beautiful 

 Papaver Cambricum was very conspicuous and abundant. 



The singular little island of Carrick-a-Rede, its flexible 

 bridge of ropes, and the neighbouring sea-caves roofed with 

 Asplenium marinum, are well worth a visit; and so is the 

 Giant's Causeway a few miles to the westward, for of a sure- 

 ty it is most curious, but when the terms "stupendous," "gi- 

 gantic," "sublime," &c. are given to this curiosity, they are 

 certainly misapplied. When the guides first tell him " that 

 is the Causeway," and point to a low, brown, tame-looking, 

 sea-beach, the most phlegmatic man in the world must inevi- 

 tably feel disappointed ; but as he walks onwards and finds 

 that he is treading on the tops of basaltic pillars, of various 

 but regular figures, triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, 

 and heptagons, he cannot but be struck with the curiosity of 

 the affair. Compared with Staffa, the Giant's Causeway is so 

 insignificant that I am persuaded that were it on the beach of 

 that magnificent basaltic island, it would never have been no- 

 ticed up to the present hour. The guides here are a great 

 and insuperable annoyance, and their name is Legion ; they 

 are of no use whatever, and by what title they hold the right 

 of worrying strangers I am quite at a loss to ascertain. 



Donegal is a fine county for the naturalist ; here are vast 

 and unbroken tracts of mountains, and here man, that is, ci- 

 vilized man, has rarely set his foot. The bog is covered with 

 the common ling [Calluna vulgaris), and a variety of Carices 

 and coarse sour grasses ; a few scattered sheep, and an oc- 

 casional flock of twenty or thirty white goats, may here and 

 there be seen wandering over the boggy waste. You scarcely 

 ever see a tree, although the bog contains the remains of the 

 trees of former ages. The abundant and almost universal oc- 

 currence of the remains of vast timber-trees in the wastes of 

 Scotland and Ireland, where trees are now almost as rare as 



