334 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
Pmguicula grandiflora, wliieh we would have given somewhat to have 
Been in blossom. Silthorpia Europea, one of the Scrophularinefe, 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 clianging 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 Red) 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 Herefordshii'e were accumulating beneath the 
waves of the Old Eed 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 lied of the south of Ireland. A fossil fern has been discovered in 
Orkney, and is described in the " Testimony of the Ilocks " (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 
Ked and Carboniferous epochs which once clothed the lands of these 
latitudes, is only to be found in the records of the rocks. As extinct 
