LESLIE — MEGACEEOS HIBEENICTIS 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 EEMAINS OF THE MEGACEROS HIBEBmCUS IN 
GYPSUM IN lEELAND. 
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- 
tween the fiiUow and rein-deer. la 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 
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 
square miles in extent, underlying the glacial drift, embedded in and 
sometimes alternating M^ith 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 
forming hills of 500 or GOO 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, 
