DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS IN FELSTEAD, ESSEX. 201 



a large bod of Horse radish. For some years subsequendy the 

 leaves were hoed off once in the spring and reaped in the autumn, 

 and in the winter the crowns occasionally fell a victim to the plough- 

 share. This adverse treatment was not excessive, yet the plants 

 only lived about twenty years. 



The Common I'^lm {Ulmus campestris)^ (seedless in luigland) 

 on the other hand, makes its way well in North Essex. It is the 

 commonest tree in the hedges, and may be said to flourish in the 

 l>lackwater valley above lUaintree, and seems to delight in striking 

 its roots into the W'estleton gravel and sands which there predominate. 

 There are some very fine trees at Saling Grove, and on the village 

 green there, there is a magnificent specimen which girths twenty-one 

 feet at five feet from the ground. It perhaps exceeds a hundred feet 

 in height, and at the top has produced a sport which may be called 

 a tree in miniature. 



The nidus upon which a seed falls directly affects the distribu- 

 tion of plants, and in some cases ultimately gives a character to the 

 landscape. Thus we often speak of the prevalence of an arenaceous 

 or calcareous flora, which is equivalent to stating the final outcome 

 of distribution for that locality. In Essex these results are not so 

 marked ; the variety of forms bearing some proportion to the variety 

 of soils. We are not quite without evidence as to the difficulties 

 plants have met with in colonizing our county. In my neighbour- 

 hood there are a few lanes in which the Chalky Boulder Clay is 

 exposed with scarcely any covering of surface soil, and at some 

 places none at all. The flora of those lanes is, as regards indi- 

 viduals, very meagre, and has been such for the last half century. 

 If therefore plants can make no headway with their present wealth 

 of numbers and immediate contiguity, what a sad disadvantage they 

 must have been at in earlier Post-Glacial times. It may even be 

 conjectured that the colonisation of East Anglia fell behind some 

 other counties. 



I would here call attention to the general appearance of wild 

 vegetation in North Norfolk as compared with that of Essex and 

 South Sussex — say the neighbourhood of Hastings, or within twenty 

 miles of it. Hedgerows might be taken from Essex and transferred 

 to Sussex, and vice versa, without the possibility of detection ; yet 

 this does not hold for North Norfolk. Many species are con- 

 spicuously different there, and the proportion of those remaining 

 are vastly altered ; yet the soil agrees with that of Essex, whilst that 



