60 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



trict, by the Duke of Sutherland, large trees were dug out 

 from a depth of 3 feet in the mosses, which were charred 

 with fire from 10 to 15 feet of their length — some of these 

 even now measuring 3 feet in diameter and very fresh. 

 " Some of them are cored out with fire for several feet in 

 length as if they had been burned down " {In lit., 13th 

 Jan. 1879). * 



We have been assured by Mr Thomas Mackenzie that there 

 is not a tree standing in Sutherland that is one hundred years 



old. 



Ireland. 



I intended to have treated of the past and present dis- 

 tribution in Ireland, as mentioned in my former portion of 

 this essay, but I now find it quite unnecessary to do so, my 

 friend Mr E. M. Barrington having fully exhausted the subject 

 in an able paper read before the Eoyal Irish Academy, which 

 paper I now hand round for examination ; and I would parti- 

 cularly direct attention to the map. 



The only point in which I differ from Mr Barrington is in 

 respect to what he says on page 4 of the said tract, viz., 

 that " its present remarkable distribution, and its rapid in- 

 crease of late years," is an " argument against its being indi- 

 genous." My reasons for disagreeing in this respect will, 

 I trust, be made plain to you later, when I come to treat of 

 its restoration and increase in Scotland. Meanwhile, it is, 

 perhaps, sufficient to say that the squirrel lingered longest in 

 Scotland where the largest tracts of wood remained, and pro- 

 bably did not become extinct in the forest of Eothiemurchus, 

 and that it only increased and spread in directions where 

 fresh young plantations were formed, affording natural out- 

 lets : that we have proof also of the keen winters affecting 

 them severely, and causing migrations, and their abandoning 

 small and non-continuous coverts of hard wood, overcrowding 

 the denser wooded districts, both in past and in later seasons. 



* At the present day, in Transsylvania, it is a custom of the gypsies, and 

 travellers, and huntsmen, and even the woodmen, to kindle fires for cooking 

 and warming themselves inside of the hollow boles of the old oak trees {vide 

 Ibis, 1875, p. 190, and Journal of Forestry, 1879, p. 477). None of these, 

 however, which we saw standing were charred outside, and nearly all were 

 vigorous and green. 



