Journal of Proceedings. xxix
ran through Ilford about 200 yards south of the present High Road.
In the village are eight houses and a chapel, formerly part of a
Hospital dedicated to St. Mary and St. Thomas of Canterbury, now
used as Almshouses for poor persons, and supposed to have been
founded by Adeliza, Abbess of Barking, in the reign of King Stephen,
as a retreat for lepers. Of course there is a trace of one of Queen
Elizabeth's hunting lodges; ignoble, indeed, must be the locality in the
Forest district which does not claim some remembrance of the
Imperial (and imperious) Diana. From the Naturalist's point of view
the lanes, ditches, and marshes about Ilford are not without attrac-
tions, although the impious and devastating hands of the speculative
builder are active at their evil work: "destroying beauties that took
centuries to make and not a month to mar." But on this charming
Saturday afternoon, we (that is some fifty or sixty members and friends
of "Our Club") have not met to lament the blows dealt by a money-
loving and land-jobbing generation at the fair face of Nature, nor to
talk scandal about Queen Elizabeth—we seek records of a past com-
pared with which human histories and legends are but tales of yester-
day, and look for antiquities treasured up in the womb of earth, aeons
before Auctioneers were dreamt of as the coming Iconoclasts ! And long
will Ilford claim a place in the remembrance of those true antiquaries,
the Geologist and Palaeontologist ; not from its perishing tokens of
Roman Legions, fair Queens, fat Abbots, or prim Nuns, but from its
rich store of fossil bones: relics of the gigantic animals which lived and
died in Britain during the ages limiting that wonderful phase in its
life-history, called Pleistocene in modern Earth-lore. The story of the
discovery of these records of old-world life at Ilford dates back for
nearly seventy years. In 1812, about 300 yards from the River Roding,
in a field forming part of an estate called "Clements," some bones of
Oxen, horns of Stags, and head bones and teeth of Elephants were
disinterred ; and in or about 1824, Mr. Gibson, of Stratford, obtained
a collection from near the same spot, portions of which are now supposed
to be in the Museum of the College of Surgeons. One of our party,
Mr. J. Eliot Howard, F.R.S., informed the Editor that he well
remembered, when a boy, some of Mr. Gibson's specimens being
brought into his father's office at Stratford, and seeing them undergo
the process of anointing with a solution of glue to prevent them
crumbling into pieces. Then, years afterwards, Sir Antonio Brady
took up the quest; with what success let his magnificent collection
of Pleistocene Mammalia serve as an imperishable memorial. We
have the honour and great advantage of his company this afternoon
as one of our conductors, his coadjutor being Mr. Henry Walker,
F.G.S. so well known to members of the Club. Our party also in-
cludes Mr. A. R. Wallace, F.L.S., the celebrated traveller, philoso-
phical naturalist, and geologist; Mr. Worthington Smith, F.L.S., of