8 The Irish 'Naturalist, January, 



Another monstrous parody of Natural History is what 

 a returned American — if such a one can be conceived as 

 taking an interest in the subject — would call the " county 

 stunt." Some people have objected to the partition of 

 Ireland into only two divisions, but if they only knew ! 

 The craze for finding an animal or plant in as many counties 

 as possible has recently been very popular in Ireland. 

 Kerry is its Mecca, the Irish Naturalist is its Koran, but 

 it would not be seemly to name its prophet in these pages. 

 Papers after this fashion are even more unreadable than 

 the " Kerguelen " kind, and are often illustrated with 

 weird maps resembling ancient antimacassars. Ardent 

 champions of this game announce with triumph that one 

 of their recent epoch making discoveries constitutes " the 

 eleventh record of this species for County Tyrone," and 

 they select for their collecting trips, places so situated that 

 they can make rapid raids into three or four adjacent 

 counties. As the poet says : — 



Primroses by the river's brim 

 New County Records are to him, 

 And they are nothing more. 



The " county " mania often takes the form of an 

 attempt to divide Ireland into a number of similar " ideal " 

 divisions, each of which would have its lake, river, patch 

 of bog, mountain over i,ooo feet in height, and so on. 

 Surely, if the country is to be sub-divided any more than 

 it is at present, this is a topsy-turvey method of procedure. 

 If the divisions are to portray anything in nature, then 

 the more dissimilar they are the better. Moreover, no 

 system of divisions " satisfactory " to the student of the 

 terrestrial fauna and flora could be applied to the in- 

 habitants of fresh-water, still less to those of the sea. 

 Distributional limits are fixed by ecological, not geo- 

 graphical, conditions, and vary according to the group, 

 or even species, under consideration. 



Attempts to express distribution by symbols, numbers, 

 and abbreviations arc also to be deplored. They render 

 nauseating an already tedious subject, and any doubtful 

 economies of time and space are more than counterbalanced 

 bv the irritation thcv cause to the reader. 



