IRELAND, an island forming pait of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ire land, lies between lat. 51° 26 and 55' 23' n., and long. 5° 20' and 10° 26' west. It is washed on the n., w,, and s..lay tho Atlantic, and on the e, by a strait, called at differeat.
places the North channel, the Irish sea, and St. George's channel, which separates it from the larger island of Great Britain. Its greatest length, from Fair head in Antrim to Crow head in Kerry, is 306 m., but its greatest meridional length is not more than 225; its greatest breadth, between the extreme points of Mayo and Down, is 182 m., but between Galway bay and Dublin it is not more than 120. The total area is about 32,524 sq.m., of which 15,464,825 acres are arable land; 4,357,338 acres are uncultivated; 316,597 are covered with wood; 49,236 are occupied by towns of 2.000 inhabitants and upwards; while the lakes and waters of the country cover 627,464 acres. Pop. '71, 5.412,377. Ireland is divided into four provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, which again are subdivided into 32 counties. The following table exhibits the area of the different provinces and counties, the number of inhabited houses, and the pop. in 1861 and 1871 (as at first published): Physical is of oblong form, and, like Great Britain, the eastern coast is comparatively unbroken, while the w., n., and s. are deeply indented. It is an undulating or hilly country—less rugged than the Highlands of Scotland, and not so tame as the eastern section of England. Its hills are more rounded than abrupt, and lie not so much in ranges as in detached clusters round the coasts. These mountain tracts rarely extend more than 20 m. inland, and they seen to form a broad fringe round the island; while the interior appears as a basin composed of flat or gently swelling land. The principal ranges are the Mourne mountains in Down, which attain their highest elevation in Slieve Donard, 2,796 ft. above the sea; the mountains of 'Wicklow, which rise to a height of 3,039 ft.; and Macgillicuddy Reeks in Kerry, which, in the peak of Carran-Tual, the• loftiest point in Ireland, reach 3,414 feet. The purely flat or level
portions of the island, with the exception of some fine tracts of fertile valley-land in Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Limerick, consist mainly of bog or morass, which occupies, according to Dr. Kane, 2,830,000 acres, or about a seventh part of the entire super ficies, The largest of these morasses is the bog of Allen, which stretches in a vast plain across the center of the island, or over a huge portion of Kildare, Carlow, King's and Queen's counties—having a summit elevation of 280 feet. Extensive tracts of deep wet bog also occur in Longford, Roscommon, and other counties, and give a pecu liarly dreary and desolate aspect to the scenery. Notes ithstanding the quantity of water in these bogs, they exhale no miasma injurious to health, owing to the large quantity of tannin which they contain.
llydrography.—The principal river of Ireland, and the largest in the United King dom, is the Shannon (q.v.). The streams which drain the eastern part of the central plain are the Liffey and the Boyne; the south-eastern part, the Suir, the Barrow, and the Nore; while the waters of the north-eastern part are collected into Lough Neagh. chiefly by the Blaekwater, and thence discharged into the sea by the lower Bann. The rivers external to the great central plain are necessarily short. The principal are the Erne, flowing to the n. w. ; the Foyle and the Bann, to the n. ; the Lagan, to the n.e.; the Slaney, to the s.e. ; and the Bandon, Lee, and I3lackwater, flowing in an easterly course through the co. of Cork, the most southern co. in the island. None of these rivers are naturally of importance to navigation. The Shannon, however, has been made navigable to its source by means of locks and lateral cuts; the Barrow, by similar means, to A.thy; the Foyle, by can-al to Strabane; and several of the others have been artificially' united by such lines as the Lagan, Newry, Ulster, Royal, Grand, Athy, and other canals—which now intersect a considerable portion of the island.