30 The Presidential Address.
felled trees being probably often allowed to block up stream-
lets.67
Apart from this indirect influence upon our flora, it is to
the Romans that we probably owe the first intentional intro-
duction of new trees. To them we probably owe68 the Chest-
nut, the Sycamore, the Box and the Laurel, together with the
Walnut, Pear, Medlar, Quince, Damson, Peach, Cherry,
Mulberry, Fig, and Vine, though it is impossible to say
whether some of these introductions date from the Roman
occupation or only from the missionaries of the fifth century.
Thus Professor Earle, from a study of early English plant-
names, says69 "we seem led to the conclusion that the Saxon
acquaintance with Roman botany must be dated as high as
the Conversion, even if it be not the heritage of a provincial
Roman culture." The Roman remains in our own county
testify to the wide diffusion of general culture, art, manu-
factures, and luxury, under the Empire ; whilst the works of
Columella, Pliny, and Dioscorides, which belong to this
period, tell us of the extent of the Roman knowledge of
agriculture, botany, and medicine. Myself, I think it most
probably to the period of occupation that we owe the trees I
have mentioned, only one of which, the Pear, may, I think,
have previously existed in the island, in a wild state. To
this period belong also the Parsley, which has become a
common garden escape during the last hundred years, the
Opium Poppy, which they cultivated for its oil, the Turnip,
the Rape, and the Cole-wort, besides a number of un-
intentional introductions of corn-field weeds. Crowing a
variety of crops in Italy and Gaul, and having perhaps
57 "The felled wood was left to rot on the surface, small streams were
choked up in the levels ; pools formed in the hollows ; the soil beneath,
shut up from the light and air, became unfitted to produce its former
vegetation ; but a new order of plants, the thick water-mosses, began to
spring up; one generation budded and decayed over the ruins of another,
and what had been an overturned forest became, in the course of years,
a deep morass."—Hugh Miller, 'Lectures on Geology.'
58 Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib. xv., c. 25. Pearson, op. cit., p. 54.
59 'English Plant Names from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century,'
1880, p. liv.