That radical disappearance of the forests, in a country once covered with them, is singular. A great many explanations have been given of this fact,—explanations that went back as far as some geological cataclysm. Such theories are no longer acceptable in these days. The most likely supposition is that all the available timber has gradually been felled down for domestic uses, and that indifference, poverty, incessant war, incertitude as to the present or future, have, from the remotest times, prevented those sad gaps being repaired. On the lower land the absence of timber is explained of itself by the apparition of deep layers of turf, whose depth is sometimes from forty-five to sixty feet, in which whole oak trees have been discovered in a more or less advanced state of carbonisation. At a certain stage of this transformation the ligneous tissue has become of such flexibility that the Irish cut it into stripes and use it to make straps, fishing nets, bands of all kinds,—not to mention the pious trifles, pipes, small figures carved with a knife, and various _souvenirs_ with which they pester the tourist. The turf pits are a great source of riches for Ireland, and furnish the only fuel commonly used by the lower classes. In the country one sees everywhere people engaged in extracting peat, cutting it into cakes, erecting these cakes in pyramids to be allowed to dry in the sun, or transporting them from one place to the other. The people working at it are, indeed, almost the only ones visible in the fields. One might think that the extracting and manipulating of the turf were the only industry of the country. There are two kinds of turf, the red and the black, according to the degree of carbonisation attained by the layers, and the nature of the vegetable matter that formed them. The finest is of such intense and brilliant black, that it might almost be mistaken for coal. Those vast reservoirs of fuel, known in Ireland by the name of _bog_, are a constant feature of the landscape in the valleys of the mountainous girdle as in the lower parts of the plain. The total depth of these open carbon mines is estimated at no less than sixty million cubic feet; they occupy an area almost equal to the seventh part of the total superficies of the island, and the lakes cover another seventh part. * * * * * One other striking peculiarity of the scenery in Ireland is the scarcity of cultivated fields. One can count them, dotted here and there, almost always planted with oats, potatoes, or turnips. The statistics of the Agricultural Society give, in round numbers, for twenty millions of acres of total surface, five millions, or a quarter in cultivated ground; that is, 150,000 acres only in cereals, 350,000 in turnips, one million and a half in potatoes, two million in artificial meadows. Ten million of acres are in natural meadows; the rest are fallow lands, bog or turf, waste land, roads and highways.