136 The Irish Naturalist. April, 



Ice Age that it seems to have been from their point of view 

 nearly asphyxiated. Dr. Scharff thinks all our fauna and all 

 our flora lived through it. And even those authorities who 

 shrink from accepting Dr. Seharff's opinion in its entirety, 

 take for all practical purposes the same view as he does of the 

 insignificance of the Ice Age. For they all seem to agree that 

 a part of our Irish fauna and flora existed through the Ice Age : 

 and of course if any part did, that must have been what is now 

 the oldest part, the so-called Lusitanian element-, the southern- 

 most, and, one might say, the most delicate, from the point of 

 view of their present European distribution, of the animals 

 and plants now found in the British Isles. For example, 

 there is the Arbutus, which most of us, I suppose, have at 

 some time seen growing in its native home at Killarney. 

 Who would select the Arbutus as a plant capable of resisting 

 a very high degree of cold ? Yet the Arbutus is one of that 

 small group of West of Ireland species which must, if any of 

 our flora lived through the Glacial Age, have been among the 

 hardy survivors. I do not, therefore, see that we save any- 

 thing in a priori probability in suggesting that only some of 

 our plants lived through that terrible time. If any did, the 

 Arbutus was among the number, and we may dismiss the 

 Glacial Age from our minds as nothing worse than a slight 

 chill. 



At the same time, Mr. Ussher's and Dr. Seharff's explora- 

 tions of late years in the caves of our southern and western 

 counties clearly show that at some period, either after or not 

 very long before the " Great Ice Age," we had in Ireland a 

 good many interesting animals that have since become ex- 

 tinct. They were not all animals that cold would be likely to 

 extinguish, though some of them possibl) 7 were. Some, like 

 the Arctic Fox, whose remains Dr. Scharff has unearthed in 

 Co. Clare, point to former land connections with the very far 

 North. Some, like the celebrated African Wild Cat, identified 

 from the caves of the same county, and the Hyaena of whose 

 former abundance in Co. Cork we see such indisputable 

 evidence given by Mr. Ussher 1 , belong obviousl} to a time 

 when we were more intimately connected with the South. 



1 Irish Naturalist, November, 1906. 



