LESLIE — MEGACEKOS HIBEENICUS IN GYPSUM. 



165 



universally colder climate, and an equally wide-spread lower descent 

 of the line of perpetual snow on our mountains, that when the sea 

 was boiling, and the evaporation yet more abundant, the colder still 

 should have been the condition of our planet's land- surfaces, until, 

 in fact, the snows of the land should have touched the waters of the 

 boiling ocean, and have melted only on the margins of its shores. 

 This argument would indeed have been viewed as the reductio ad ah- 

 surdum ; but the Professor does not bring us quite to this dilemma. 

 He presumes the radiant heat of the earth was sufficient to drive 

 outwards the upper atmospheric sphere of radiation and condensa- 

 tion far above and beyond the loftiest mountains. We give the 

 conclusions to which these speculations lead their author — namely, 

 " that a liquid ocean can only exist upon the surface of a planet so 

 long as the latter retains a high internal temperature." " The moon 

 becomes thus," he says, " a prophetic picture of the ultimate fate 

 which awaits our earth when, deprived of an external ocean, it shall 

 revolve round the sun an arid and a lifeless wilderness." A not 

 very comforting prospect truly, which we doubt not will be very 

 long indeed before it commands popular assent. 



ON REMAINS OP THE ME GA CEB OS HIBERNICTTS IN 

 GYPSUM IN IEELAND. 



By David Leslie, M.D. 



The " Irish Elk " has been hitherto only found in the shell-marl 

 underlying extensive turbaries. It is a true deer, intermediate be- 



, tvveen the fallow and rein-deer. In England it has been found in 

 lacustrine beds, brick-earth, and ossiferous caves (Owen). The sub- 

 ject of the present paper is a dorsal vertebra belonging to a skeleton 

 quite as large, if not larger than the specimen in the College of 



I Surgeons Museum, London, with which it was compared. It was 

 found on the Shirly property, in a bed of gypsum, county of Mo- 

 naghan, Ireland. This gypsum-bed is very extensive, being many 



i square miles in extent, underlying the glacial drift, embedded in and 

 sometimes alternating with a fine ferruginous clay. The subjacent 

 rock is the older or lower coal sandstone, which lies unconformably 

 on the mountain limestone, which reposes on the Silurian, the latter 



1 forming hills of 500 or 600 feet elevation in the immediate neighbour- 

 hood. The surface-soil is formed of ancient drifts of different ages, the 



' one containing enormous blocks of mountain limestone, the other, 

 the older, more compact, and containing small fragments, very rare, 



