NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
229
auricula, D.C. By Mr. E. E. Turner, at Coggeshall. Lamium incisum, Willd.
This form or species has been found at Walton-on-Naze, by the Rev. J. D. Gray
—J. C. Shenstone, Colchester.
Epping Forest in the Sixties.—In the "Cornhill Magazine for March,
1864, vol. ix., pp. 350-6, there is an article on "The Forest of Essex." Speaking
of the privilege of woodcutting (top-lopping), the writer remarks (p. 353) : "It
is continued to this day in certain parishes, and the consequence is that such a
thing as a real natural tree is hardly to be found." He then adds : "It is very
surprising in such a wood as Loughton, where there are more than a thousand
acres of waste, and perhaps a million of trees, to note how not a single one escapes
lopping. The visitor from London, walking there in the summer time, when
the lopping is not taking place, and there is nothing to call the villagers into
the wood, is struck with the silence and the solitude ; but if he begins to indulge
any fancies about primeval wastes unspoiled by man, a glance at the trees will
correct him. They are not, strictly speaking, trees at all, but strange, fantastic
vegetable abortions. Their trunks, seldom more than a foot or eighteen inches
in diameter, are gnarled, writhed, and contorted, and at about six feet from the
ground, just within reach of the axe, they spread into huge overhanging crowns,
from which spring branches which are cut every other year or so, and never long
escape the spoiler ; then, baffled in their natural instinct to grow into branches,
the trees throw up spurs and whips from their roots, and every pollard stump—
more or less rotten at the core—is surrounded with a belt of suckers and of
sprew. Enchanted bands of Circe's transformed revellers, struggling Laocoons,
Dantean forms in pitiless Infernos—the general effect, particularly in the season
of wild flowers, is something strangely weird, and, in a sense, intensely beautiful ;
but it is no more nature's notion of primeval woodland than are closely-cropped
hair and shaven lip and chin her intention for the real expression of the human
face."—Extracted by Mr. T. V. Holmes.
Vitality of Seeds.—"I think I ought to have told you of an instance of this
that has come under my notice this year in Norsey Wood. Last winter I opened
one of the Bowl-shaped Hollows, which I told you of, by excavating a deep trench
diametrically through it, down to the maiden soil below, some eight feet below the
surface. I have very frequently visited the spot all through the spring and
summer till now. In August, a few weeks after the heavy rain which ended our
long drought, I was struck by several lines of plants shooting from the several
layers of darker soil (apparently vegetable mould) which my trench had cut
through vertically. These were the Common Foxglove, and the lowest layer of
them must be not less than three feet below the lowest part of the bowl before it was
opened. Here the upper layers seemed to overhang, so that the plants seem to
have grown out of a recess in which no seeds could well have been recently blown
or lodged. The keeper (J. Bellingham) was very much surprised. He states
that 'there have been no Foxgloves growing in this part of the wood for some
five years past.' If, as it seems, the seeds were deposited when the dark layers of
soil were formed, the lowest must have lain dormant for many scores of years,
perhaps for centuries."—(GENERAL) B. R. BRANFILL, Billericay, October
4th, 1895.
The Essex Earthquake of 1692.—Mr. Henry Stopes has found a MS. book
"in the library of Colchester Castle," which appears to have been the Common-
place Book of Thomas Witham, who in 1610 was appointed rector of Mistley-cum-
Manningtree In this book there is a reference to the Colchester earthquake of