76 The hish Naturalist, April, 



may very well have been introduced to the burnt areas 

 immediately or soon after the fire from closely adjoining 

 unburn t areas. And this may have been effected in one or 

 other of two ways by wind carriage (not necessarily or 

 probably through the air, but along the ground) or by the 

 operations of the park-keepers on the morning after the fire. 

 In their vigorous slashings and tramplings amongst the 

 unburnt or half -burnt thickets and herbage around the burnt 

 areas, with a view to preventing any further outbreak of fire, 

 they could hardly avoid scattering seeds over the blackened 

 and lifeless spaces where the fire had already done its work. 

 And if in the case of any one of the seven species just men- 

 tioned these means of dispersal had proved inefiicient, 

 may not the disturbance of the soil of the burnt ground, 

 partly by the burning of the upper crust, partly by the 

 trampling of the keepers, have set free some seeds which lay 

 dormant and protected from burning a few inches below the 

 surface ? 



On the whole, then, the observations made last year on 

 the Killiney Hill burnt ground afford no sufficient proof 

 that any one of the eleven species found there in the seedling 

 stage within three months after the fire originated from seed 

 which had survived a full exposure to that fire. Nor, must 

 it be confessed, do they yield any proof to the contrary ; 

 for it may be that the hard, nut -like fruits of the Labiates, 

 Glechoma hederacea and Teucrium Scorodonia, are quite 

 capable of enduring degrees of heat greater than any caused 

 at or close to the ground surface by the combustion of an old 

 Gorse spinney. Inconclusive as the observations have been, 

 they may at least have a certain interest as showing how 

 strongly nature in these temperate regions abhors a vegetable 

 vacuum. 



Sandycove, Co. Dublin, 



