64 The Irish Naturalist. 



age; to the eastward they are said to repose on Tertiary basalts. 

 These last extend over the adjoining counties of Antrim and 

 lyondonderry in vast level sheets, attaining a total thickness 

 of some 1,200 feet, and containing between their successive 

 lava-flows, deposits of earthy iron-ore with plant-remains, and 

 occasional thin bands of lignite. The petrified or silicified 

 w^ood has been found over the whole of the area occupied by 

 these whitish clays which we have described, and fragments 

 of it occur in boulder-drifts and other local Pleistocene 

 deposits over a much larger area; but along the south-eastern 

 margins of I^ough Neagh especially have these trunks and 

 branches of wood, turned into hard flinty rock, been found. 



lyCt us now see what writers on Ireland and Irish geology 

 have to say about the silicified wood. As early as the ninth 

 century a writer states as follows: — 



"There is another lough that hardens wood into stone. Men cleave 

 the wood and when they have fashioned it they cast it into the lough, 

 where it lies to the beginning of the year, and at the beginning of the 

 year it is found to be stone, and the lough is called Lough Bchach " (an 

 early name for Lough Neagh). 



In a famous but somewhat rare book ''Ireland's Natural 

 History," by Arnold Boate, dated about 1650, there is a 

 section of a chapter devoted to this subject. In section 7, 

 chapter 9, he writes: — 



" Before we make an end of this chapter we must say something of the 

 wonderful property which generally is ascribed to Lough Neaugh, of 

 turning wood into stone ; whereunto some do add, to double the won- 

 der, that the wood is turned not only into stone but into iron ; and 

 that a branch or pole being stuck into the ground, somewhere by the 

 side where it is not too deep, after a certain space of time one shall find 

 that peece of the stick which stuck in the ground turned into iron, and 

 the middle, so far as it was in the water, into stone, the upper end which 

 remained above the water keeping its former nature. But this part of 

 the history I believe to be a fable." 



Harris, in his description of the Co. Down, 1744, goes very 

 fully into this matter. After treating of the healing qualities 

 of its waters, he writes: — 



" The second property ascribed to this Lake — viz., of petrifying and 

 converting Wood into Stone, challenges some Attention ; and the more 

 so, as Antiquity and universal Consent have conspired to give it this 

 Quality. But Fable has been fruitful in adding a remarkable Particular 

 to this Property ascribed to the Lough— viz.. That the Wood is turned 

 partly into Stone and partly into Iron." 



