1862.] REVIEW. 57 



able Bede, or Beda, as the Rev. Josh. Stevenson would have us 

 write his name, relates that, in his time, the channel separating 

 Thanet from the mainland of Kent was at least half a mile wide. 

 Subsequent writers inform us that, down to so recent a period 

 as that of Henry VII. or Henry VIII., ships of small burden in 

 winter sailed up this strait, and thus both shortened the distance 

 and escaped the perils of the stormy sea by the North Foreland. 

 Modern historians and geographers do not inform us when 

 this passage was abandoned, but they are very circumstantial in 

 their accounts of the present state of this channel, which was 

 anciently several miles broad. The popular belief is, that when 

 the river Stour, which flows by Ashford, Wye, Canterbury, etc., 

 approaches the island near Grove Ferry, — a name significant of 

 the ancient condition of this locality, — its stream separates into 

 two rivers, one of which flows north and the other south. " Here 

 the Stour," writes a modern authority, " parts into two branches, 

 one of which falls into the estuary of the Thames, and the other 

 into Pegwell Bay. A short walk along the river, from Minster 

 to Grove Ferry, will satisfy the curious inquirer that the river 

 Stour does not produce an ofi- shoot, or bye-blow, or bastard 

 river, or a little Stour, but keeps in its own channel, which is not 

 wide, but pretty deep, for it is navigable above Grove Ferry, and 

 conveys all the Avater it has at Canterbury, and all that it receives 

 in its course from the city to the island, and discharges the whole 

 into the sea not far from Rich borough. In brief phraseology, the 

 account universally given and credited is a myth ; or, in plainer 

 terms, there is no division nor separation nor parting of the 

 waters of the Stour. It is another and a distinct streamlet that 

 flows to the northward, and falls into the sea or the Thames 

 estuary near Reculver. 



Vorgefasste Botanische Meinungen, vertheidigt von Dr. Johannes 

 RoEPER, Prof, in Rostock. 



This pamphlet, which has reached us lately from a kind Con- 

 tinental correspondent, to whom the Editor of the ' Phytologist' 

 gladly acknowledges his obligations for other contributions, is 



N. S. VOL. VI. I 



