354 



NATURE 



[August I, 1878 



leading naturalists of the day on the subject, the Royal 

 Commissioners came to the following conclusions : — 



1. That the occasion of the removal of these collec- 

 tions to the new buildings now being erected at South 

 Kensington for their reception be taken advantage of to 

 effect a change in the governitig authority and official 

 administration of that division of the museum. 



2. That the director of the natural history collections 

 should be appointed by the Crown, and should have the 

 entire administration of the establishment under the con- 

 trol of a Minister of State, to whom he should be imme- 

 diately re sponsible. 



Now it is hardly necessary to point out that if the 

 Bill before the House of Commons be passed in its 

 present state (whereby all "the rights, powers, duties, 

 and obligations" of the Trustees of the British Museum 

 are expressly reserved), the recommendations of the 

 Royal Commissioners will be treated as so much waste 

 paper. If the Government appoints a Commission of the 

 best men of the country to advise them on a subject of 

 which they know nothing, it seems to us to be hardly 

 civil to allow an Act of Parliament to be passed in th« 

 teeth of their deliberate recommendations without even 

 taking the trouble to explain why these recommendations 

 are not to be carried into effect. Yet this is what is now 

 proposed to be done. 



HULL'S GEOLOGY OF IRELAND 

 The Physical Geology and Geography of Ireland. By 

 Edward Hull, M.A., F.R,S. (London : Stanford, 1878.) 



THE great map of the veteran Sir Richard Griffith, 

 followed by the detailed labours of other geologists, 

 especially of the Geological Survey, and of its lamented 

 director, the late J. B. Jukes, has explained the 

 general geological structure of Ireland, and sketched, 

 partly in outline, partly in considerable detail, the 

 curious problems which that structure suggests. As yet, 

 "however, the abundant published information to be 

 gleaned from papers and memoirs regarding Irish geology 

 lies chiefly scattered through the Transactions of various 

 scientific societies, and the Explanations of the Survey. 

 Some of these publications are not nearly so widely 

 known as they deserve to be, or as they assuredly would 

 be if it were more easy for geological students in general to 

 procure a reading of them. Mr. Hull has, therefore, done 

 good service in preparing this little handbook to the geology 

 and geography of Ireland. It is a most useful compen- 

 dium of information, and its utility is greatly enhanced 

 by the references to those works and papers where the 

 subjects he discusses are more fully treated. 



The volume is divided into three parts. In the first 

 of these the author gives a digest of what is known 

 regarding the geological formations of Ireland. In 

 treating of the palaeozoic rocks, he follows Harkness 

 ind others in regarding the metamorphic rocks of the 

 aorth-western counties as the general equivalents of the un- 

 altered Lower Silurian masses of the rest of the island, thus 

 identifying both groups of rocks with those, which occupy 

 X similar position in Scotland. In this he is undoubtedly 

 correct, and is quite justified by the sections published by 

 Murchison and others. In these days, however, when 

 almo.i every dictum of our fathers is called in question. 



and when able observers on both sides of the Atlantic 

 are loudly proclaiming that they can find no true palaeo- 

 zoic gneiss and schist anywhere ; when Alpine rocks — 

 once devoutly regarded as metamorphosed Cretaceous 

 strata— have been pushed back and back till their 

 enemies will not let them have a footing among any even 

 of the palaeozoic formations,' it certainly would be a good 

 and serviceable piece of work to fix, if possible, by means 

 of fossils, the horizon of the quartzites and limestones of 

 Donegal, and to demonstrate, by numerous transverse 

 sections, that these rocks pass truly, and with no de- 

 ceptive overturn, beneath the younger gneissose and 

 schistose masses. In Prof. Hull's necessarily brief 

 summary he does scant justice to the Old Red Sand- 

 stone. To some extent he makes up for this by the 

 greater fulness of his account of the Carboniferous 

 system, to which he gives considerable interest by the 

 parallelism, suggested by his long experience in Lan- 

 cashire and elsewhere, between the -established divisions 

 of the system in England and the grouping which he has 

 been able to recognise in Ireland. The fragments of 

 Permian and Mesozoic deposits in the north of Ireland 

 are duly mentioned ; a more detailed description is given 

 of the huge volcanic plateau of Antrim, and the succes- 

 sive stages of its history ; while the Glacial and Post 

 glacial formations receive tolerably ample illustration. 



Having laid his foundation of facts, Mr. Hull proceeds, 

 in Part II., to build upon it his explanation of the present 

 physical geography of Ireland. Beginning with the 

 mountains he arranges them in groups, and points out in 

 each case the evidence of their age. The remark just 

 made regarding the metamorphic rocks of Donegal may 

 be repeated here in reference to the alleged age of these 

 north-western mountains. Of course as Upper Silurian 

 rocks lie against them and contain conglomerates derived 

 from them, these heights must be far older than Upper 

 Silurian times. The author assigns them to a long 

 unrepresented interval between the Upper and Lower 

 Silurian periods — a date to which the corresponding Scot- 

 tish Highlands have also been referred. In dealing with 

 the Wicklow Highlands so admirably worked out by 

 Jukes and his colleagues, Mr. Hull suggests that as the 

 granite there was certainly protruded before the Old Red 

 Sandstone had been laid down, it may even have been 

 earlier than Upper Silurian time, and "therefore syn- 

 chronous with the mountains of Donegal, Mayo, and 

 Galway." But the Old Red Sandstone of the South of 

 Ireland, thick though it be, seems to represent only the 

 upper member of that system. The vast period of the 

 Lower Old Red Sandstone, so rife elsewhere in subter- 

 ranean movements and volcanic outbursts, is not known 

 in the south of the island, unless", we may conjecture the 

 Wicklow granite to belong to that epoch. The numerous 

 and characteristic ridges and isolated eminences which 

 in the south-western counties and in the central plain rise 

 out of the Carboniferous plain, often with a central core 

 of contorted Silurian rocks, are assigned to an interval of 

 terrestrial disturbance between the Carboniferous and 

 Permian periods. The evidence for this conclusion is 

 fragmentary and has been skilfully marshalled into form 

 by the author; but it cannot be regarded as by any 

 means conclusive. Yet more uncertain is the reference 

 of the Mourne Mountains to the Permian period. That 



