1S95.] Carpenter. — Mingling of the North and South. 59 



if he will, that the list is not the end : that each step towards 

 a more complete knowledge of the geographical distribution 

 of animals or plants is a step towards a more complete know- 

 ledge of the past history of the species he has studied, of their 

 original home, their emigrations and immigrations, their 

 advances and retreats ; a more complete knowledge of the 

 nature and positions of the old lands over which they passed, 

 of the old seas, lakes, or rivers by whose margins they wan- 

 dered. These are the problems which the combined work of 

 the systematic and distributional naturalist and of the field 

 geologist — may they ever work side by side — must help to 

 solve. And when the problems have been solved, we shall 

 see not only the hypothetical ancestor ; we shall restore in 

 imagination the sunken continent wherein he lived, and the 

 severed isthmuses which his descendants crossed. 



The members of our Galway Conference might have 

 furnished material to the ethnographist for an interesting 

 study. Gathered in that old western city were men and 

 women representing varying types of race, and speaking with 

 differing accents their common English tongue. A true 

 Irishman whose ancestors have lived in the land since the days 

 of the mythical heroes of the old folk-tales ; an Ulsterman 

 whose name is evidence that his forbears came from the '' land 

 of the mountain and the flood " ; a member of one of those old 

 Anglo-Norman families whose long sojourn in this island is 

 said to have made them ''more Irish than the Irish"; a 

 Dubliner, settled since a few generations on Irish soil, though 

 his name and sympathies mark him for a Teuton ; an unmis- 

 takably English immigrant, who seems nevertheless to have 

 come here to stay ; another Englishman who will return to 

 his own country when the Conference ends : — all these types 

 might have been noted by the Connemara roadside or on the 

 deck of the Duras. And the thoughtful naturalist could not 

 fail to consider how this mixed assembly was typical of the 

 fauna and flora of Ireland, made up as they are of varying 

 elements which have entered the country at different times 

 and by different roads — at what times and by what roads it is 

 our business to find out/ We might present each of these 

 typical naturalists with an appropriate animal or plant, whose 



' C. Kingslej'— " On Bio-Geology " (1871) in "Scientific Lectures and 

 Kssays." London, 1880. 



A 2 



