The Magncsian Limestone of the Cork District. 139 



made deep channels in this soft and easily-solved rock. Then 

 succeeded the so-called Permian period, with its lagoons of 

 concentrated sea- water, from which the dolomite was deposited 

 over the limestone still remaining, and also down deep in the 

 parallel cracks which scored its surface. Later on, another 

 period of denudation ensued, viz., the Glacial epoch, which has 

 left such enduring marks upon the geological features of the 

 district, and the soft Permian strata were all cleared away, with 

 the exception of that portion deposited in the limestone fis- 

 sures, and which, under the name of the Magnesian lyimestone 

 of the Cork District, forms the subject of these notes. ^ 



THK COLBOPTKRIST IN IRELAND. 



BY W. E. SHARP. 



Dubinin County — North Coast. 



To the present writer, whose misfortune it is to be a native of 

 the larger of the islands of the United Kingdom, Ireland had 

 always seemed, viewed from an entomological stand-point, to 

 be a land not so much of definite promise as of vague possi- 

 bilities. In earlier days we had no authentic list of Irish 

 Coleoptera (a want, now how well supplied as regards the 

 north, by the Rev. W. F. Johnson, the readers of this serial 

 know). What might be discovered in a land which cultivation 

 had so little altered — a land of undrained bogs, wild, rough 

 mountains, lakes, and moors, and wildernesses, and one withal 

 of so singularly mild and equable a temperature — it was im- 

 possible to conjecture. There were the theorists, who suggested 

 that the remnants of that arctic, or glacial fauna, restricted in 

 England to the highest altitudes, whose places had been occu- 

 pied by newer races from the Continent, adapted to a more 

 temperate era, had been driven ever westward by that incur- 

 sion from the east, and might even now be found, perhaps, 

 more abundantly in the west of Ireland than anywhere on this 

 side the channel. Then there was that idea of a former land- 



^ Since the above theory was conceived, it has received confirmation, 

 by the discovery that the observations of others in the North of Ireland 

 had led them to the conclusion that Permian beds existed there also. 

 See Hull's Phys. GeoL and Gcog. of Ireland, second edition, pp. 67-70. 



