present paper will therefore be concerned with its 
broader geological aspects. Viewed from any of the 
neighbouring spurs, the valley of the Ownacree (the 
“Quagmire River” of the Ordnance Survey) now seems 
occupied by a black flood, winding with the course of the 
original stream. Here and there lake-like expansions 
occur, with pools of water on their surface ; and, lower 
down the valley, the stream asserts itself, and is now 
cutting out a channel through the débris, or, rather, is 
washing out its original course. Without an intimate 
acquaintance with the country, it is difficult to know what 
changes have occurred in the form of the true valley- 
floor; but the local constabulary assert (/7eeman’s 
Journal, January 2, 1897) that a considerable deepening 
of the valley has resulted in places from the scouring 
action of the flow. This obviously applies only to the 
first two miles or so below the quarries, where the stream 
originally ran over a flank of the great Annagh bog. At 
and below Annagh Bridge no trace of any deepening is 
to be seen ; the torrent is merely washing its way clean 
again, and revealing the original boulders on its floor. 
To return to details, the passage of the flow across the 
western road, between Quarry Lodge and the older 
quarries, resulted in the filling up of a limestone-quarry 
and the destruction of the embankment of the road, 
together with its double hedges. Judging by the state of 
things at Annagh Bridge, the upper bridge may perhaps 
be found also standing, when the peat-flood can be cleared 
away. The destruction here is, however, considerable, 
and the oozing of the material through the hedges reminds 
one of the behaviour of some of the thin lava-sheets of 
Hawaii. Great stems and roots of timber, formerly 
buried in the upper bog, have been floated down, and 
stick up fantastically, like arms waving from the flood. 
The main road to Killarney is thus effectually breached ; 
and astill more striking scene occurs on the parallel road 
at Annagh Bridge (Fig. 2). Here the floor of the valley 
was flat for nearly half a mile west of the bridge, and 
was divided into a number of fields. The peat has 
covered the whole of these, and climbed, as has been 
said, against the wall of Lyne’s cottage. The road is 
broken into sections and seems utterly destroyed ; and 
bog-timber, which is abundant in this district, juts out 
everywhere above the slime. The peat has left traces 
on the top of the buttresses of the bridge, six feet above 
the present level of the water; and movements were 
noticed here in the subsiding flow a week after the 
catastrophe. 
After this wild scene, the valley narrows, and the black 
borders to the stream show the height to which the flood 
first rose ; every boulder has a bank of débris behind it, 
and islets of peat, bog-timber, and grassy tussocks have 
risen in the middle of the stream. The piers of Six- 
Mile Bridge, close to Barraduff, six miles from the 
original bog, are still clogged with timber, and show 
peat-patches a good five feet above the stream. Even 
travellers by rail can trace from this point downwards 
the black deposits on the banks of the Ownacree, down 
to the viaduct before Headford Junction. 
As to the origin of the bog-slide, it must be compared, 
as already hinted, with the phenomena of surface-creep, 
which are strikingly illustrated by the stone rivers of the 
Falkland Isles and the constantly occurring landslides 
of the taluses of Tyrol. The ridging of soils upon steep 
hillsides is a well-known and milder form of this sliding 
motion ; and a field laid out upon a slope, in an even 
moderately rainy climate, may be considered as being 
always added to at the upper end, and carried away 
down-hill at the lower. In peat-bogs, the water finds its 
way out in numerous channels into the main stream of 
some neighbouring valley; and the banks of these 
channels are always in a state of flux. During stormy 
weather, the black saturated lower layers of the bog are 
washed out in far larger quantity than the brown and 
NO. 1420, VOL. 55| 
NALIURE 
[JANUARY 14, 1897 
drier upper layers. Rifts and signs of movement in the 
latter will then readily occur. 
As Sir R. Griffith pointed out in 1821, there is little 
cohesion between the water-logged lower layers and the 
impermeable clay or other material which underlies the 
whole, and which allows, in the first instance, of the ac- 
cumulation of the bog. The moving bog in the King’s 
County was accounted for by the occurrence of a dry 
season, during which extraordinary cuttings were made, 
giving a face of thirty feet. The pulpy lower layers were 
thus reached, and were set free, carrying away the upper 
masses on their surface. The process is analogous to 
that which forms caverns in many lava-flows, the fluid 
lower portion becoming liberated and rushing out from 
under the upper part. 
Similarly, the deep cutting of the bog of Knocknageeha 
may have been injudicious in so wet an area. It is 
possible that official inspection is required in these 
matters, as in more elaborate quarrying operations ; and 
the loss of life in the present instance makes a con- 
sideration of the condition of other bogs at least desir- 
able. But the immediate cause of the flow seems to 
have been the heavy rainfall of December 1896, which 
raised the level of the water in the workings and the 
level of saturation in the bog. Even in broad day- 
light it would have been impossible to check the move- 
ment, when once the Kingwilliamstown road had been 
overpowered. The slope on which the bog moved, 
making in the first mile an approximate allowance for the 
original thickness of the peat in Knocknageeha, falls 
about 120 feet in the first mile, 100 feet in the second, 
95 feet in the third, and 45 feet in the fourth. The fall 
of the valley-floor as far as Annagh Bridge is thus 
about one hundred feet per mile, decreasing rapidly 
before the bridge ; and it may be remembered, for future 
guidance, that this fall is sufficient to allow of a bog- 
slide of truly catastrophic character. 
GRENVILLE A. J. COLE. 
NOTES. 
Ir is stated that Sir Joseph Lister, on being raised to the 
peerage, has selected the title of Lord Lister. 
Lorp KELVIN and Prof. Simon Newcomb have been elected 
honorary members of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, 
and Lord Rayleigh has been elected a corresponding member. 
THE Geological Society of London will this year award its 
medals and funds as follows :—The Wollaston Medal to W. H. 
Hudleston, F.R.S.; the Murchison Medal and part of the 
Fund to Horace B. Woodward, F.R.S. ; the Lyell Medal and 
part of the Fund to Dr. G. J. Hinde, F.R.S.; the Bigsby 
Medal to Clement Reid ; the proceeds of the Wollaston Fund to 
F. A. Bather; the balance of the proceeds of the Murchison 
Fund to S. S. Buckman; the balance of the proceeds of the 
Lyell Fund to W. J. Lewis Abbott and J. Lomas. 
ANOTHER instance of the interest which the German Govern- 
ment takes in the advancement of science is afforded by the fact 
that an item in the Prussian estimates is a vote of 50,000 marks 
to the Ministry of Public Instruction for investigations with the 
Rontgen rays. The yote (says the Berlin correspondent of the 
Times) is justified by a reference to the importance which the 
new invention has been shown to possess in the spheres of 
physics, anatomy, physiology, zoology, botany, and kindred 
sciences. The object of the grant is to enable institutes and 
certain men of science to procure the necessary apparatus, and 
to defray the expense of exhaustive experiments. 
THE Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin announces that the 
term for competition for scientific works and discoveries made 
in the four previous years 1893-96, to which only Italian authors 
