A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 29
they are, at the railway station, at two o'clock on
the Saturday next following the discovery. They have
sniffed the quarry from afar, and have come in multi-
tudinous array, and with something of the hunter's zest, to
stalk the country. Perchance some lingering game may
yet be found, now that the ancient lurking-place has been
revealed.
The scene on which we are entering this Saturday
afternoon is full of forest history and tradition. What
more excites the memory of the history-loving Londoner
than the mention of the old Essex forests, whose fragments
of their former self still linger near our City? Time was
when all the Essex county lay within the bounds of a Royal
forest—when the "dim and watery woodland" stretched
across from Waltham to Colchester and the sea. What giant
specimens of the once abundant forest fauna may not still
be found in Essex to tell us of the former grandeur of these
wild arboreal tracts! These may be the speculations passing
in our minds as our train moves out of the station, and
carries us into the heart of Bethnal-green, where, from the
viaduct, we look down upon the vast acreage of red-tiled
housetops that spread before us. But other topics intervene,
and we will not lose the talk of our fellow naturalists, each
of whom has some discovery or incident of recent rambles to
relate. The microscopical brethren of "The Quekett" tell
of researches made on Saturday last in Hackney Marshes—
of curious polyzoans found in the Canal, of strange-looking
"glochidiae" and other creatures with fearsome names, and
of Anacharis (Babingtonia damnosa!) choking the brooks.
The geologists, too, are full of narrative and anecdote. You
hear what places around London are good for field geology—
what new gravel pits, railway cuttings, and other excava-
tions have recently been visited, and what fossils from
the clay, or sand, or chalk have thus been found. So we
soon pass Mile-end Station and find ourselves at Ilford.
Here at Ilford we leave the train, which runs on to
Chelmsford and Colchester some sixty passengers the
lighter. Ilford itself has something to reward the traveller,
who will not look in vain for ancient monuments of man's