NOTES ON IRISH NATURAL HISTORY. 65 



shipping, and scarcely a creek to afford a doubtful and tem- 

 porary shelter in extreme dislvess. The cliff is worn by the 

 ocean into forms more wonderfully grotesque, and oft-times 

 more strikingly picturesque, than the most vivid imagination 

 could devise. Here a peninsula of rock stands boldly out to 

 sea, and the isthmus which connects it with the land has for 

 centuries lost its basement, and only exists as abridge, hang- 

 ing as it were by magic over the dark waters, which meet and 

 strive, with thundering din, hundreds of feet below its aerial 

 span ; — there, an enormous cleft in "the face of the cliff, riven 

 as by an earthquake, forms a wedge-shaped chasm, into which 

 the vast waves gambol one after another like huge leviathans, 

 playing a thousand antics, and sending the "playful spray" 

 aloft, to be borne on the wings of the wind. Then comes 

 some vast cavern, with vaulted roof and gigantic columns, 

 divided maybe into a hundred minor caves, in some of which 

 a ship might float with every stick standing; and from these 

 caves there issues such a reverberation of the roar of waters, 

 that thunder might mutter its loudest and remain unheard. 



1 took the southern cliff from Kilkee, and skirted along its 

 extreme margin as best I could. Where it was broken and 

 uneven, and I could accomplish it with safety, I descended 

 the cliff as far as practicable ; I often found the crevices fdled 

 with Asplenium inarinum, Aster Tripoliimi, Silene rnaritima, 

 Arenaria marina, &c. &c. Nothing could exceed the auda- 

 city of the gulls while I was clambering about these .cliffs : 

 some of them came so near me that I could have touched 

 them with a whip, and their screaming was fearful. There 

 were also flying around me curlews, hawks, and choughs ; 

 — the curlews whistling, the hawks screeching, and the 

 choughs chattering; but the gulls were the most noisy and 

 numerous of alL On the top of the cliff is a short close herbage, 

 of that kind which in England we call good sheep-walk ; and 

 on this, and the turf walls which separated it, were rooks, 

 carrion crows, hooded crows, ravens, magpies, and choughs 

 innumerable ; the latter bird predominating in number over 

 all the others of the crow family. Further along the coast I 

 saw a settlement of sea-birds ; puffins, guillemots, rasor-bills 

 and corvorants, intermixed with the eternal sea-gulls : and I 

 saw three large birds which I supposed to be the great north- 

 ern diver; they sat up like penguins, on a rock that just 

 peeped out of the water, and was now and then covered by 

 the swell ; this sometimes carried off one or two of the divers, 

 but they almost instantly returned and resumed their station. 

 The distance from the top of the cliff to the water will, I think, 

 afford an excuse for my inability to name the species. 



Vol. IV.— No. 38, n. s. i 



