SOME MICRO-ANALYSES OF "MOORLOG." 107
Marshes do we see Wild Celery, Brookweed, Creeping Jenny,
Agrimony, Water-mint and Scirpus maritimus. In Bow Marshes
he collected Meadow-sweet, Loose-strife and Water-Speedwell ;
Fleabane at Plaistow, and in West Ham Marshes Gipsywort,
Skull-cap, Marsh Woundwort, and Frog-bit. The rarest plant
in the collection is Swine's Succory, Arnoseris pusilla, gathered
between Tottenham and Leyton in 1845. This is a local
plant in Britain ; in Gibson's Flora of Essex it is recorded from
several parts of the county, including "the common fields,
Walthamstow."
The old order changes ; Greater London has swept over
most of this south-west corner of Essex ; and this little collection,
made eighty years ago, forms, as it were, a country milestone,
marking a stage in the history of our neighbourhood that few
now can remember.
SOME MICRO-ANALYSES OF "MOORLOG"
FROM THE DOGGER BANK.
By O. G. E. ERDTMAN.
[Read 31st January, 1925]
IN the Essex Museum of Natural History, Stratford,
are preserved specimens of the interesting peaty deposit
known to the North Sea fishermen as "moorlog." Of these
specimens and their contained organisms an account was pub-
lished by Messrs. Whitehead and Goodchild in the Essex
Naturalist, 1909, under the title "Some Notes on 'Moorlog,'
a Peaty Deposit from the Dogger Bank in the North Sea." This
paper also contains a note on the plant rem:.ins by Mr. and
Mrs. Clement Reid. Their conclusion as to the climatic
conditions during which the moorlog was formed is as follows
(loco citato, p. 55) : "The climate to which the plants point,
though scarcely Arctic, may be described as sub-Arctic. The
white-birch is the only tree, unless one or two badly preserved
fragments may belong to a sallow ; the alder is absent. All
the plants have a high northern range, and one, the dwarf
Arctic-birch, is never found at sea-level (except very rarely in
the Baltic provinces of Germany) in latitudes so far south