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ON THE FI.ORA OF THE SHORES OF THOUGH DERG. 



BY NATHAN I EI. COI^GAN, M.R.I. A. 



Within the thirty years which have elapsed since the 

 publication oiCybele Hibernica marked an epoch in the historj^ 

 of Irish botany, great strides have been made in the explora- 

 tion of our island flora. All of our mountain groups, almost 

 all of our larger coast islands, a majority of our river-basins, 

 and many of our larger lakes have been carefully surveyed by 

 trained observers, so that absolutely virgin soil for the botanist 

 must be sought in the wide midland areas which await, if they 

 do not strongly invite, the attention of explorers. Yet it would 

 be a mistake to assume that all the promising fields for 

 methodical botanical work in Ireland have been exhausted. 

 All of them, no doubt, have been skimmed from time to time 

 by botanical epicures in quest of such strong sensation as may 

 be found in a new record, or a first glimpse of some rare 

 species in a known locality ; but the thorough survey of not 

 a few of such areas has been neglected, just because they lack 

 the stimulus of complete novelty. 



A typical example of such imperfectly explored, though by 

 no means unvisited fields of inquiry is to be found in the 

 shores of that imposing expansion of the River Shannon, 

 which stretches for some 25 miles from Portumna in the north 

 to Killaloe in the south. Since the late Dr. Moore made the 

 beautiful lake botanically famous by the discovery on its north- 

 west margin of the Willow-leaved Inula {hmla salicina), rarest 

 of Irish plants, and mysteriously absent from the far richer 

 flora of Great Britain, many a botanist, native and British, 

 has visited Lough Derg, but none has undertaken so much 

 as a preliminary survey of its shores. So having a week's 

 leisure on my hands towards the end of July last it occurred 

 to me that it might be very pleasantly spent in a botanical 

 cruise down the lake from Portumna to Killaloe. With a 

 shore-line of fully 90 miles in length it was obviously hopeless 

 to aim at putting together in so short a time a complete list 

 of even the summer plants. But, by a judicious selection of 

 centres along both shores, the western or Galway shore, and 



