178 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



closely to the truth than those which he later adopted as the result of a 

 perusal of the literature and of hurried traverses of the country. 



That these views are still part of the ci-eed of Irish geologists wiU be 

 evident fiom the few following quotations fiom recent pubKeations ^ : — 



T. Hallissy, in a Memoir of the Geological Survey of Ireland,- of 1914, 

 speaks (p. 29) of an 



" Irish snow-field occupying an axis ranning north-east and south- 

 west, and extending right across the country to the south of the Ox 



Mountain range." 



And again, in the Proceedings of the Eoyal Irish Academy of the same year^ : 



'"'The great central Irish snow-shed occupied eompai-atively low 

 ground, south of the Ox Mountain range, and extended along an axis 

 running north-east and south-west fiom Lough Xeagh to Lough Conib. 

 From this axis the ice moved towai'ds the sea in all directions, swamping 

 the whole of the present Irish area, and passing at its north-eastern and 

 eastern margins into the Scottish glacier." 



He recognises, however, the comparatively small part played by the Scottish 

 glaciation in Ireland, for he says* : — 



" The Scottish ice was, however, unable to extend far into the eovmtry, 

 and it probably never reached the western coast. The increasing accumu- 

 lations of snow in tlie central Irish suowfield soon produced ice sufficiently 

 massive to arrest the progress of the Scottish glacier and to deflect it 

 westwards to the Atlantic and southwards into the Irish Sea." 



As will he shown in the sequel, the onward march of the Scottish ice was 

 stopped, not by " the accumulation of suow in the central Irish snowfield," as 

 Mr. Hallissy suggested, but by the great ice-streams that proceeded from the 

 Highlands of Donegal 



Professor GrenvUle A. J. Cole, F.E.S., in his description of the " Geology of 

 Ireland," in the " Handbuch der E^onalen Geologie,"= writes of the local 

 Irish glaciation as follows : — 



" It is now generally recognised that the piincipal deposition of snow 

 occurred along an axis extending from near Galway to Lough Xeagh." 



' The two maps illustrating J. R. Eilroe"s paper, in the Journal of the Geological 

 Society, are reproduced in the latest edition of A. J. Juies Broim's The Building of 

 the British Isles, 3rd edit. (1911), figs. 74 and 75. 



- The Geology of Clare Island, County Mayo. 



^Vol. xxsi, Pt. 7, p. 9. ^I6ia., p. 30. 



' Geology of Ireland, in Steinmann's Handbuch der Regionalen Geologic, 1916, 

 p. 328. 



