The Presidential Address, 13
The Influence of Man upon the Flora of Essex.
It may Le doubted whether the whole of England has ever
been simultaneously submerged since the Chalk period, if it
were so even then. The great elevation, however, which
seems to have marked the earlier part of the Glacial Epoch,
followed as it was by a depression perhaps more than a
thousand feet below existing levels, probably cut off the
history of the flora represented by the pines and alders of the
Cromer forest-bed and the Arctic Willow and Dwarf Birch of
the Bovey-Tracey clay, or at most left as its only repre-
sentatives those alpine species of North "Wales with which
we in Essex are not immediately concerned. The second
continental period in that epoch is, therefore, probably that
during which the bulk of our British flora migrated from
what we may term its Germanic mainland, from the chalky
uplands of the Ardennes, from the palaeozoic rocks of
Belgium, from the alluvial plains of Lower Rhineland, from
the forests of the Hartz and of Denmark. It is no part of
my present purpose to attempt to determine the first appear-
ance of man upon the scene.
The savage known to science as Palaeolithic man, the
contemporary of our great extinct Thames Valley fauna,
seems to have been wholly ignorant of agriculture, and may
even have been entirely pre-glacial and have roamed through
forests of the no-longer indigenous Scotch and Spruce Firs.
It is with the far more modern Mongolian Neolith that we
are now first concerned—the comparatively cultured race
who came perhaps not more than ten or twelve thousand
years ago from their lake-dwellings in Switzerland 6 and from