THE AGE OF SOME EXISTING SPECIES OF PLANTS, 811 
Flora, that unhappily for science was never published, though it 
still exists in manuscript. Other collections of British plants of 
, but less complete, supplemen those of Buddle: 
perfect as compared with those which we shall hand down to our 
successors for their u 
: ch 
taking place in plants, it is certain that the three hundre 
during which their dried remains have been preserved in herbaria 
have been too short to exhibit them. 
Beyond the time of those early herbaria the materials which we 
owe in any way to the intervention of man have been preserved 
been occupied by the British before and after the appearance of the 
Romans, we find that the woods chiefly used by them were oak, 
birch, hazel, and willow, and at the latter period of occupation of 
the village the wood of the Spanish chestnut (Castanea vulgaris 
Lam.) was so extensively employed that it must have been intro- 
duced and grown in the distri¢ i 
rict. The gravel-beds in the north of 
G. Smi ithie impl 
manship, the remains 0 ; 
ash, beech, hawthorn, wych-elm and hazel, together with thirteen 
of the more common species of our existing mosses. 
The most important materials, however, for the comparison of 
i a 
tombs of the ancient Egyptians. Until re ntl 
mainly of fruits and seeds. These were all more or less carboni 
because the former rifling of the tombs had exposed them to the 
3 
4 
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