1897.] 237 



THE BORDERLAND OF EUROPE. 



On the Origin of the European Fauna. By R. F. Scharff, ph.d. 

 Proc. Roy. Irish Academy (3), vol. iv., no. 3, 1897. Price \s. 6d. 



It is difficult for anyone other than Dr. Scharff himself to review this 

 remarkable paper. I have sought to avoid fate by flight ; but the work 

 still remains within my hands. With the actual connivance of the 

 editors, I write in the far north, away from books, and in contact with 

 primaeval Ireland. A peasantry, clad in the simple brilliance of old 

 days, in scarlet and green, orange and tawny brown, moves through the 

 market beneath the windows, and carries the mind a century from 

 Dublin or Belfast. To the north rises the gneissic moor of east Tyrone, 

 one of the oldest backbones of the country, swept this day with cloud- 

 drift, and chill with August rain. And here I am directed to sit me 

 down and discuss the European fauna. 



The appropriateness, however, lies in this : Dr. Scharff centres his 

 argument in ancient Ireland, and shows how the distribution of life- 

 forms in this island may be used as an indication of their successive 

 advent into Europe. His main thesis is that what he styles the eastern 

 or Siberian element in the British fauna does not occur in Ireland ; some 

 members of this Siberian fauna occur in the East- Anglian Forest-bed; 

 and the same fauna in Europe at large is posterior to the Lower Boulder- 

 clay. Hence the Forest-bed is Postpliocene, while some part of the 

 British Pliocene is contemporaneous with the Lower Boulder-clay of 

 Europe. At or soon after the period of the Forest-bed, on the above 

 evidence, Ireland was cut off from England and from Scotland. But the 

 Arctic and southern elements of the fauna of our islands both occur in 

 Ireland ; hence they must have arrived prior to the deposition of the 

 Lower Boulder-clay of Evwope, and must have survived the glacial epoch 

 in the area in which they are now found. 



This, I take it, is the principal contention of the present paper ; but 

 its eighty pages are full of valuable information, and of new light thrown 

 upon facts which have been elsewhere set before us. Much of our know- 

 ledge of the Irish fauna, from the point of view of distribution, will be 

 found to be due to recent researches, and notably to those of Dr. Scharff 

 himself. The encouragement given by the Field Clubs and by the Irish 

 Naturalist to individual observers is certain to bear further fruit ; but it 

 seems doubtful if the central facts, the absence of the Siberian fauna 

 from Ireland and the date of its spread across Europe, can be shaken by 

 future observations. 



Dr. Scharff at the outset makes light of the supposed accidental or 

 artificial introduction of species into Ireland, and argues that the present 

 fauna contains 95 per cent- of species (p. 434) which are sound for the 

 purposes of his zoo-geological argument. This fauna, it is only reason- 

 able to suppose, migrated from Europe — if it did migrate at all — across 

 dry land. Whatever point of view we may take, a land-connexion, on 

 and off through Cainozoic times, existed between our isles and the 



continent of Europe. 



A 4* 



