THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 85
Fungus Foray in Hatfield Forest enabled Dr. Cooke and his
coadjutors Messrs G. Massee and E. M. Holmes to publish
preliminary lists of the Fungi, Mosses, Lichens and Liverworts
of that hitherto unworked district, and to add some twenty-five
species to the Essex Flora (Essex Naturalist, IV., 219-221).
The late Mr. E. G. Varenne having left a rich herbarium of
Cryptogamic plants collected by himself over a period of forty
years at and around Kelvedon, these were catalogued and a
valuable paper published on the whole collection by Mr.
Marquand in 1891 (Essex Naturalist, V., 1-30). This list
comprises a few coast species and Mr. E. M. Holmes has
published in the same volume (Loc. cit. 263) a note on the
marine algae and flowering plants observed between Harwich and
Dovercourt. A complete provisional list of the marine Algae of
Essex was drawn up and communicated to the Club three years
later by Mr. E. A. L. Batters (Ibid. VIII., 1-25). In 1896 Mr.
Arthur Lister gave an address on the Mycetozoa at our annual
Fungus Foray in which he referred to the species observed in
Epping Forest (Ibid. X., 23).
Our botanical labours have thus on the whole been of the
nature of species recording--a branch of work which, as in
zoology, it is most appropriate for a local society to undertake.
Mr. Shenstone, who is writing the chapter on Botany for the
Victoria History of Essex, informs me that his article is an
epitome of the work of the Club. The wider problems
of botany have not, however, been altogether neglected,
and many of our experts have from time to time addressed
our meetings on the general biology of certain groups. I
may remind you that Prof. Boulger gave us his views con-
cerning the evolution of fruits in 1881 (Trans. II., 1) and that
he first published his suggestion concerning the adoption of the
river-basins of Essex as natural history provinces in a paper
read at a meeting of the Club the same year (Trans. II., 69).
The following year this same author read his first paper on the
history of Essex botany (Proc. III., vii.), the first part of which,
dealing with the botanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, has now been completed, and three instalments have
appeared in the Essex Naturalist (XI. 57, 169, 229). As a
valuable contribution to economic botany Mr. Paulson's paper
on the disease affecting the birch trees must be specially men-
tioned (Essex Naturalist, XL, 273).