334 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



Pinguicula grandiflora, which we would have given somewhat to have 

 seen in blossom. SiUhorpia Europea, one of the Scrophularineae, is 

 , said to have been found in the district, as well as on Common Hill, 

 near Dingle. There is much food for thought on those geological 

 phenomena which affect the distribution of plants, by changing the 

 physical conditions of regions, altering the climate, and various other 

 causes ,* and we could not but reflect upon that far distant time, of 

 which the Brownstone (Upper Cornstone of the Old Bed) on the 

 summit of the hill, is a representative, a period of which we know but 

 little of the vegetation of this plant, and that little is dim and obscure. 

 The Upper Silurians had their club-mosses, which is all we know 

 of the history of the earth's terrestrial vegetation when those 

 beds were deposited. But the Upper Cornstones of the Kerry 

 mountains represent a period that, geologically reckoning, could not 

 have been very long anterior to the wonderful vegetable epoch 

 that produced the Paleozoic coal. During the deposition, in the sea, 

 of those Brownstones, which are now elevated into hill ranges, it is 

 not improbable that noble Conifers, with tall Lycopodiacese and gallant 

 Ferns, flourished on the land at no very distant spot, when the grits 

 and sands of the Brownstones of Ireland and the Eurypterus-beds of 

 the Upper Cornstones of Herefordshire were accumulating beneath the 

 waves of the Old Bed Sandstone sea. The floras of the earth, like the 

 ancient animals, appear to assume a higher type of organization as we 

 ascend in the history of geological formations, and approach the 

 present time ; nevertheless, animals and plants are constantly being 

 detected in strata where, a few years since, their occurrence would 

 have been deemed an impossibility. Mr, John Miller, of Thurso, 

 possesses a large collection of Old Eed Sandstone plants ; similar speci- 

 mens have been found by Mr. Peach, at Wick, and Dr. Hamilton, in 

 Orkney ; and similar fragments are found abundantly in the Upper 

 Old Eed of the south of Ireland. A fossil fern has been discovered in 

 Orkney, and is described in the ^' Testimony of the Eocks " (pp. 25) ; 

 in short, in the words of Mr. Salter, we possess in ''an era as far back 

 as the middle Devonian (Cornstone series) a vegetation of considerable 

 importance." 



These ancient floras have passed away, and the vegetation of the Old 

 Bed and Carboniferous epochs which once clothed the lands of these 

 latitudes, is only to be found in the records of the rocks. As extinct 



