THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 85 



Fungus Foray in Hatfield Forest enabled Dr. Cooke and his 

 coadjutors Messrs G. Massee and E. M. Holmes to publish 

 preliminary lists of the Fungi, Mosses, Lichens and Liverworts 

 of that hitherto unworked district, and to add some twenty-five 

 species to the Essex Flora (Essex Naturalist, IV., 219-221). 



The late Mr. E. G. Varenne having left a rich herbarium of 

 cryptogamic plants collected by himself over a period of forty 

 years at and around Kelvedon, these were catalogued and a 

 valuable paper published on the whole collection by Mr. 

 Marquand in 1891 (Essex Naturalist, V., 1-30). This list 

 comprises a few coast species and Mr. E. M. Holmes has 

 published in the same volume [Loc. cit. 263) a note on the 

 marine algae and flowering plants observed between Harwich and 

 Dovercourt. A complete provisional list of the marine Algae of 

 Essex was drawn up and communicated to the Club three years 

 later by Mr. E. A. L. Batters {Ihid. Will., 1-25). In 1896 Mr. 

 Arthur Lister gave an address on the Mycetozoa at our annual 

 Fungus Foray in which he referred to the species observed in 

 Epping Forest {Ibid. X., 23). 



Our botanical labours have thus on the whole been of the 

 nature of species recording — a branch of work which, as in 

 zoology, it is most appropriate for a local society to undertake. 

 Mr. Shenstone, who is writing the chapter on Botany for the 

 Victoria History of Essex, informs me that his article is an 

 epitome of the work of the Club. The wider problems 

 of botany have not, however, been altogether neglected, 

 and many of our experts have from time to time addressed 

 our meetings on the general biology of certain groups. I 

 may remind you that Prof. Boulger gave us his views con- 

 cerning the evolution of fruits in 1881 [Trans. II., i) and that 

 he first published his suggestion concerning the adoption of the 

 river-basins of Essex as natural history provinces in a paper 

 read at a meeting of the Club the same year [Trans. II., 69). 

 The following year this same author read his first paper on the 

 history of Essex botany [Pvoc. III., vii.), the first part of which, 

 dealing with the botanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries, has now been completed, and three instalments have 

 appeared in the Essex Natuealist (XI,, 57, 169, 229). As a 

 valuable contribution to economic botany Mr. Paulson's paper 

 on the disease affecting the birch trees must be specially men- 

 tioned (Essex Naturalist, XL, 273). 



