Hart — Flora of the Mountains of Mayo and Galway. 703 



is more schistose in its nature, and on some slight prominences in a 

 steep and rapidly degrading declivity, a few alpine plants occur. 

 Here, as on Croaglipatrick in a less striking manner, one cannot fail 

 to be impressed with the idea how insecurely established these slight 

 patches of rarer plants on a continually wearing surface must be; how 

 many may have disappeared, or are gradually disappearing, except on 

 those mountain ranges where solid ranges of cliifs occur. This 

 crumbling schistose rock is, in Mayo and Galway, the chief home of 

 the alpine plants, overlying the prevalent quartzite formation in de- 

 tached positions, and forming a rich and suitable soil by its rapid dis- 

 integration. Its scattered and infrequent occurrence, as well as its 

 unstable nature, may, in some degree, account for the unsatisfactory, 

 casual distribution of the alpine flora. 



A.t the base of JS'ephin, on the south-western side, there is a con- 

 siderable patch remaining of an ancient forest. During my visit to 

 this part of Mayo I lodged with a kindly and respectable " strong " 

 farmer named Daly, who has lived here for seventy years, and whose 

 forefathers held the ground before him. He remembers when, instead 

 of a strip a couple of miles long, there were many square miles of 

 forest, which, in his father's time, clothed the long valley northward 

 towards Deal Bridge ; when the bitterns, ''like bulls," answered one 

 another over the moors. He had seen rirffs here in his youth, a pair 

 of which had been shot about forty years ago, and the mad-ye- cran 

 (pine-marten) was then frequent in the forest. There was also " a 

 wild cat which dogs that would face a fox would not cope with." I 

 was specially interested in his account of squirrels having formerly 

 been frequent in these native woods, which, if true, would surely 

 establish its claim to being an indigenous inhabitant animal of Ireland. 

 My informant was very intelligent and apparently, as well as by repu- 

 tation, quite trustworthy. At the mention of squirrels, I asked him to 

 describe them, which he did, and their " drays," as he had seen them 

 in these woods, quite correctly. He says they are still there in much 

 diminished numbers, living, as of old, on the nuts which abound there. 

 These remarks may savour to some more of romance than of scien- 

 tific research, and must, no doubt, be received with caution ; but the 

 question whether the squirrel is indigenous or not in Ireland has been 

 the subject of much careful investigation by my friend Mr. Barrington, 

 who has, in an able Paper on the subject, decided against it. The 

 above clue, if worked out, may thi'ow new light on the question. 



The mention of the forest led me to the above digression. I ex- 

 amined these woods carefuUy, and found the following trees to be 

 indigenous : — ash, oak, birch, mountain ash, alder, sallow (^'afe caprcea), 

 hazel, and blackthorn. Some of the alders are remarkably well grown 

 — forty to fifty feet high — with a trunk over a foot in claameter ; the 

 ash trees are of medium size ; the oaks old, but badly developed. 



The alpine plants I observed on oS^ephin were — Saxifraga stellaris, 

 Sieracium anglicum, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, Salix herhacea and 



R. I. A. PROC, SBR. ir., VOL. III. — SCIENCE. 3 U 



