e sea in a vast
sloping plateau which pushed its course steadily onward until its
further advance was overborne by the buoyancy of the salt water, the
ends breaking off, as the Greenland glaciers do to-day, into huge
floating icebergs, which butted against one another, jammed up all the
smaller bays and fiords; were carried in again and again on the rising
tide; rolled hither and thither like so many colossal ninepins; played,
in short, all the old rough-and-tumble Arctic games through many a cold
and dismal century, finally melting away as the milder weather began
slowly to return, leaving Ireland a very lamentable-looking island
indeed, not unlike one of those deplorable islands scattered along the
shores of Greenland and upon the edges of Baffin's Bay--treeless,
grassless, brown and scalded, wearing everywhere over its surface the
marks of that great ice-plough which had lacerated its sides so long.

There seems to be good geological evidence that the land connection
between Ireland and Scotland continued to a considerably later period
than between it and England, to which, and as far as can be seen to no
other possible cause is to be attributed two very striking
characteristics of its fauna, namely, its excessive meagreness and its
strikingly northern character. Not only does it come far short of the
already meagre English fauna, but all the distinctively southern species
are the ones missing, though there is nothing in the climate to account
for the fact. The Irish hare, for instance, is not the ordinary brown
hare of England, but the "blue" or Arctic hare of Scotch mountains, the
same which still further to the north becomes white in winter, a habit
which, owing to the milder Irish winters, it has apparently shaken off.

It would be pleasant to linger here a little over this point of
distribution--so fruitful of suggestion as to the early history of the
planet we occupy. To speculate as to the curious contradictions, or
apparent contradictions, to be found even within so narrow an area as
that of Ireland. What, for instance, has brought a group of South
European plants to the shores of Kerry and Connemara, which plants are
not to be found in England, even in Cornwall, which one would have
thought must surely have arrested them first? Why, when neither the
common toad or frog are indigenous in Ireland (for the latter, though
common enough now, was only introduced at the beginning of last century)
a comparatively r