74 NOTES ORIGINAL AND SELECTED. 



woodlands. This would seem to indicate that the Gnorimus was 

 indigenous in the forest in the old days, and that the specimens 

 occasionally still found are natives to and bred in the county. 

 — William Cole. 



BOTANY. 

 Euphorbia esula Lim. in Essex. — In the Flora of Essex 

 Gibson remarks in a note upon Euphorbia esula that the dis- 

 tribution of that plant on the Continent renders it not 

 improbable that it is to be found in Essex, but up to that date 

 (1862) there was no record of its occurrence. Since then Mr. 

 Turner has found it at Witham, where it still grows, as has been 

 announced in the Essex Naturalist. I now have to record two 

 other localities for the plant. Miss Harrison, of Great Saling, 

 during a field meeting of the Braintree Ramblers at Danbury 

 found it near Linguard Common, and a few days afterwards I 

 found it in a disused garden at Broomfield. It may, of course, 

 have been an escape in the latter case, but I do not know that 

 it is ever planted for ornament. It is interesting to note that in 

 neither of the localities in the county does the plant occur in 

 " woods," the habitat generally given in British Floras. — F. J. 

 Chittenden, Biological Laboratory, Chelmsford, September 1st, 

 1905. 



ANTHROPOLOGY. 



The Deneholes of Essex. — The Times for September 30th, 

 1905, gave space for a long and very interesting special article 

 under the above title. The writer makes full acknowledgment 

 of the researches of the Essex Field Club as recorded in the first 

 volume of the Essex Naturalist, and fully agrees with the 

 views of Messrs. T. V. Holmes and \V. Cole, on the probable 

 object of the pits. He says : — 



"It is enough to say that whatsoever may have been the original purpose of 

 these excavations, or the successive uses to which they have been put, no sane 



man ever made them simply for the purpose of obtaining chalk It 



follows that we are driven back into the spacious field of probability, conjecture, 

 and tradition. The chalk-quarry theory must clear!}' be discarded. If the 

 elaborate shape and similar design of the chambers were not enough to 

 disprove it, a dozen arguments could be added. Chalk-wells, sunk deep into the 

 chalk, in order to obtain pure chalk, free from ' pipes,' we know ; but they are 

 believed to be modern, and the essence of them is that they should be deep in the 

 chalk, whereas these are deeper underground, but not deep in the chalk. Other 

 excavations in the chalk are known, near Brandon, on the borders of Norfolk and 

 Suffolk, at Crayford, Chiselhurst and elsewhere. But they are none of them 



