THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 245
Mr. E. M. Holmes reported that the Marine Algae dredged up were very few
and hardly worthy of record, Enteromorpha compressa, Gracillaria confervoides and
Antithamnion plumula were noticed, but even these only in small quantities.
During the afternoon, Dr. Taylor gave an exceedingly interesting address
''On the Marine Zoology of the Estuaries of the Orwell and the Stour." Nobody,
he said, who merely travelled over the surface of the water would ever dream of
the marvellously dense metropolis of marine life which crowded the bottoms of the
estuaries. Submarine life was not so abundant in the Stour as in the Orwell, and
his explanation of the fact was this—that the bed of the former river was more
largely composed of London clay than the Orwell, and that the mud of this clay
took a great deal of the oxygen out of the water, leaving but little to support
animal life. Dr. Taylor thought that a fairly representative collection of the
animals inhabiting the littoral zone, found everywhere between high and low
water marks in the British Islands, had been obtained ; but that, as these estuaries
opened southward, they had perhaps met with some forms of life which would not
be found in the firths and lochs of Scotland, while the latter would contain some
arctic animals not discoverable in the Suffolk and Essex estuaries. Along the
bottom of the Orwell and Stour, adapting themselves to changed climatal con-
ditions, forms of animal life had probably lingered, like those found fossilised in
the crags, and, perhaps, had lived there ever since the Crag period.