igiy. Southern — TJie State of Ireland. 9 



The last attempt to subdivide Ireland, for biological 

 purposes, was that of J. Adams,' published in these pages 

 in 1908. Not satisfied with the four provinces and the 

 forty counties and vice-counties, he instituted a new 

 partition into twelve sub-provinces, decorated with names 

 of antique flavour. A British or Continental naturalist, 

 anxious to ascertain the distribution in Ireland of a par- 

 ticular animal or plant, would be greatly edified by 

 learning that he might hope to find it in Tirawly, Tirowen, 

 Offaly, Oriell, and Brefney, or in M 103, L 120, C 003, 

 U 123. It would be necessary to illuminate every paper 

 using these hieroglyphics with a map and a long explana- 

 tion, b}^ the aid of which the reader would painfully 

 translate them into geographical terms with which he 

 had some familiarity. And yet the proud proprietors of 

 these systems always quaintly advocate them because they 

 save time and space, and convey their meaning in an 

 illuminating flash. In the system proposed by Adams, 

 rivers and lakes are used to a great extent as boundaries, 

 so that unscrupulous hunters of the aquatic fauna and 

 flora might often bring down two sub-provinces with a 

 single specimen. In the original scheme the boundaries 

 of the marine divisions, in nine out of eleven cases, ran 

 up the middle of a bay. In a subsequent note^ Adams 

 amended this, and moved the boundaries to adjacent pro- 

 jecting parts of the coast, so that the marine divisions 

 ceased to correspond exactly to the terrestrial divisions, 

 thus spoiling the beautiful symmetry which was the chief 

 hope and pride of the original scheme. The seaward 

 boundary of the terrestrial divisions was fixed at low-water 

 mark. Consequently, one shore of nine of the piincipal 

 bays w^as in one sub-province down to low-water mark, 

 and in another sub-province below low- water m.ark. One 

 might catch a crab just above low-water mark in 

 " Desmond," but if the crab were nimble enough, and 

 managed to slip into the w^ater before being captured, 

 it would figure in the records of " Thomond." If that 

 crab had been already recorded from " Desmond," but 



^Irish Naturalist, vol. xvii., 1908, pp. 145-151. 

 ^Ib. vol. xviii., 1909, pp. 1-2. 



