WARNER'S "PLANTAE WOODFORDIENSES." 223
title of Warner's book, fairly distant county localities are noted
for certain plants, such as Warley Common, Rainham, Barking,
Great Parndon, Latton, Stanford Rivers, etc., and the observa-
tion is occasionally made : " It is an Essex plant." This
seems to indicate the intention which Edward Forster con-
fessedly had of publishing a Flora of Essex. He wrote to Gibson
in 1843, "Having, as I conceive, ample materials for a Flora of
Essex, I have long thought of publishing one, and have actually
begun to arrange it. . . . My first plan was to have
printed only a second edition of Warner's Plantae Woodfordienses,
but having enough for a county Flora, I have thought it best to
extend it to all the known plants of Essex."4 However, this
intention was never carried out.
Very few indeed of the entries made by Edward are dated :
in this respect he falls far short of his brother Benjamin. One
can only surmise, from the frequent diversity in the handwriting
and the varying blackness of the ink used, that often long inter-
vals of time elapsed between the earlier and the later records,
even of an individual species. It is certain that some of the
annotations were made directly after the volume was bound in
1784 (there are notes dated 1786 and 1792), whilst other notes
are dated as late as 1840, 1843 and 1844.
Edward's free calligraphy is often difficult to decipher,
especially in some of the later notes, which are merely scribbled :
in one or two instances, but I think very few, this may have led
to errors in transcribing the notes for the present paper.
It may be well here, at the risk of recapitulation, to give some
biographical details concerning the annotator.
Edward Forster was the son of a rich city merchant, Edward
Forster the elder, and on account of the identical Christian name
was accustomed to sign himself "Edward Forster junr." as in
the present volume. His father, the head partner of a prominent
firm having its headquarters in Bond Court, Walbrook, and later
at 38, Threadneedle Street, and later still at 6 St. Helen's Place,
Bishopsgate, was for 23 years Governor of the Russia Company,
and for over 20 years Governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance
also, for a time, head of the Mercer's Company, and Deputy-
Governor to the London Docks.
Edward fils was born 12th October 1765 at Wood Street,
4. Quoted in G. S. Gibson's Flora of Essex, 1862, p. 453.