258 The Irish Naturalist. [Oct., 



The cave of Dargilan is situated in the barren limestone 

 "Gausses" region of the department of lyOzere in southern 

 France. Its mouth is stated by M. Martel, who explored it in 

 1 888, to be situated 1140 feet above the bed of the Joute and 

 three miles west of Me3^rueis. " It is," he writes,^ " one of the 

 *' most imposing caverns known. The full length of its rami- 

 " fications reaches the total of more than a mile and a half. It 

 " has no less than twenty halls . . a river 400 feet long, and 

 *' three little lakes. Its longest branch nearly a mile long, 

 " penetrates to the depth of 420 feet below the entrance." It 

 was in this deepest part of the cave that Prof. Moniez found the 

 specimen of Seira caver?iarum, with which he has now identified 

 the springtails which abound in our cavern of Mitchelstown. 



It is gratifying to have the identity of these Irish and French 

 cave-species certified by so good an authority on the Collem- 

 bola as Prof. Moniez. Strong confirmation is thus afibrded to 

 the suggestion, which I made in my first paper on the 

 Mitchelstown cave-fauna, that the same species might be 

 independently developed in two widely separated caves. As 

 I mentioned in my recent paper, very little modification 

 would be required to make the Mitchelstown Lipura Wrightii 

 indistinguishable from the Adelsberg L. stilicidii. That 

 identical species may exist in two caves separated by hundreds 

 or even thousands of miles may now, therefore, be regarded 

 as an established fact. There is, however, an alternative to 

 my theory that such a species has developed independently 

 under similar conditions, in the two localities. Some naturalists 

 would prefer to regard it as an exceedingly ancient race, 

 which, exterminated or almost so, over the wide tract of 

 country which it once occupied, has found a refuge in the 

 depths of the caves, where, degenerate and blind, it still 

 survives. Further research into the structure and distribu- 

 tion of springtails both above ground and under ground, may 

 help us to choose more definitely between these two views. 



■• K- A. Martel, "The Land of the Gausses." Appalachia, vol. vii., p. 133. 



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