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The Irish Naturalist. L Novem1)er » 



The arrangement of the book itself is, we think, not an improvement 

 on that of Dr Scharff's paper as read to the Royal Irish Academy. He 

 leads off with an introduction ; this is followed by preliminary considera- 

 tions, the two sections occupying 88 pages. Then follow six chapters 

 dealing respectively with the British fauna, the Arctic fauna, the 

 Siberian migration, the Oriental migration, the Lusitauian fauna and 

 the Alpine fauna ; but as each of these subjects has to a certain extent 

 been discussed in the first three sections, the result is much repetition 

 and frequent unnecessary quotation of the same matter. Thus Professor 

 Boyd Dawkius' views on the mixture of remains of northern and 

 southern animals are quoted or paraphrased no less than three times 

 (pages 54, 73, and 209), while Prof. Bonney on the origin of the Boulder 

 clay comes in for a ver} T similar attention. The status of the usually 

 alpine Mountain Avens, Dry as octopetala, as a plant of the sea-level in 

 Co. Galway is described on page 76 and repeated on page 240, while the 

 facts concerning the somewhat similar diversity of habitat of the 

 "Edelweiss" {Leontopodium alpimtni) are given us twice on pages 266 and 

 342, and so on. Lastly the Bibliography does not contain all the papers 

 or works alluded to in the text, e.g., the papers by the present writer and 

 Mr. Bonhote on Arctic Foxes (see footnote to page 149), that by the 

 present writer on Dr. Gadow's find of remains of the Norway Lemming, 

 (Lemmus lemmus) in Portugal (page 139), as well as a paper by Dr. John 

 Hamilton alluded to on page 161. Worse still, a study of the Index, 

 although it extends to a length of over nine pages, reveals some serious 

 omissions, such as for instance, to cite a few out of many, the important 

 allusions to the Reindeer, Hippopotamus and Hyaena in the above 

 often-quoted statements of Professor Boyd Dawkins, and to the Beaver 

 and Dormouse on page 63, while we fail to find the word " Woodlouse" 

 included, in spite of the important genera, such as Platyarthrus, to which 

 allusion is made in the book. 



Dr. Scharff's views on the European fauna are (or ought to be) familiar 

 to Irish readers from a perusal of his previous papers. Looking for a 

 small area as a key to the larger one which he had under study, he 

 selected the British Isles for that purpose, so that his main contentions 

 allude to these islands in particular. These are briefly as follows : — 

 recognizing the mixed nature of our fauna and flora, and believing 

 that 95 per cent, of it reached our islands by the ordinary means of 

 dispersal, he attempts to follow each component group to its original 

 home, and to give us the road by which each dispersal was effected. 

 The southern or Lusitanian element of our fauna, he thinks, must be of 

 very great age, and part of it may have had its origin in a lost " Atlantis," 

 or at all events from various local European centres. An Oriental section 

 reached us from the countries south of the Caucasus and Altai mainly 

 by way of the Mediterranean in times when the distribution of land and 

 sea in that region was widely different from what it is now. A Siberian 

 element (which, however, did not reach Ireland) had a more northern 

 course, while two other sections, an Arctic and an American, reached us 

 from the north by means of a great land-bridge, extending, perhaps, 



