Royal Irish Academy, 271 



tain, and supposed to have been the Urus ; but this specimen having 

 been lost, he alluded to it, to direct the attention of the Academy to 

 the subject, in the hope of having his view confirmed. He then en- 

 tered upon the principal object of his paper, which was to show, that 

 the remains of oxen found at considerable depths in bogs in West- 

 meath, Tyrone, and Longford, belonged to a variety or race, differ- 

 ing very remarkably from any noticed in Cuvier's ' Ossemens Fos- 

 siles,' or any other work with which he was acquainted. He con- 

 cluded by expressing a conviction, that Ireland had possessed at least 

 one native race of oxen, distinguished by the convexity of the upper 

 part of the forehead, by its great proportionate length, and by the 

 shortness and downward direction of the horns. As this fact seems 

 to have escaped altogether the notice of British and continental na- 

 turalists, and as analogy in the case of other Irish mammals justified 

 the view, he urged the great probability of the race in question pro- 

 ving to be one peculiar to Ireland. 



Mr. Ball exhibited specimens and drawings, and solicited the co- 

 operation of Members of the Academy in effecting a perfect eluci- 

 dation of the subject, by collecting specimens from the bogs of the 

 country. 



April 8. — Dr. Wilde, a visiter, by permission of the Academy, 

 read a paper on some Discoveries he had made at Tyre, relating to 

 the manufacture of the celebrated Purple Dye. 



Dr. Wilde stated, that having been engaged in investigating the 

 ruins of Tyre, he discovered several circular apertures or reservoirs 

 cut in the solid sandstone rock close to the water's edge along the 

 southern shores of the Peninsula. These in shape resembled a large 

 pot, and varied in size from two to eight feet in diameter, and from 

 four to five deep ; some were in clusters, others isolated, and several 

 were connected in pairs by a conduit about a foot deep. Many of 

 those reservoirs were filled with a breccia solely composed of broken 

 up shells, bound together by carbonate of lime, and a small trace of 

 strontian ; large heaps of a similar breccia were found in the vicinity 

 of the pots. This mass, a portion of wliich Dr. Wilde exhibited to 

 the Academy, is exceedingly heavy, of adamantine hardness, and the 

 shells of which it is composed appear to be all of one species, and 

 from the sharpness of their fracture, were evidently broken by art 

 and not worn or water- washed. The portions of shell were examined 

 by eminent naturalists, and are pronounced to be the Murex trun- 

 cuius, which most conchologists agree was one species from which 

 IheTyrian dye was obtained, but until now, no /^roq/" could be given 

 of its being the actual shell. 



