THE PRESERVATION OF OUR WILD PLANTS. 



393 



gradual change, some species being lost and others added to its flora. 

 Elevation of the land with reference to the sea may not only bring about 

 land connections, and so facilitate the migration of species, but by pro- 

 ducing desiccation, as has apparently happened in Biluchistan, may 

 largely alter and impoverish the flora. The recent researches of Mr. 

 Clement Reid as to the seeds found fossil in deposits geologically recent 

 indicate the former presence in England of Trapa, the Water-chestnut, 

 and, among others, of species of Naias, not now known here. It is note- 

 worthy that these are aquatic forms. Who shall say whether their dis- 

 appearance is due solely to such a natural cause as elevation of the land, 

 or to some human interference such as the indirect drainage of the 

 country dating from Roman clearing of our forests, or the deliberate 

 drainage of later times ? On the other hand, either with or without a 

 depression of the land-level, we have had, and still have, local encroach- 

 ments of the sea, which may cause the partial or complete loss of species. 

 In a startling paper on " The Diminution and Disappearance of the 

 South-Eastern Fauna and Flora within the Memory of Present 

 Observers," communicated to the South-Eastern Union of Scientific 

 Societies last year, Messrs. Webb, McDakin, and Gray speak of the 

 decadence in East Kent of no less than 500 species of plants, and not 

 a few of these, such as Statice, Salsola, Silene maritima, Hippophaii, 

 Glaucium, Cochlearia, Euphorbia Paralias, and Lactuca virosa, are 

 attributed to encroachment by the sea.* Such causes of loss as these we 

 may dismiss as being practically beyond our control. We do not urge 

 the construction of breakwaters to preserve a few beautiful or interesting 

 flowers. 



Equally inevitable, no doubt, are some of the losses attributable to the 

 increasing density of population and its concomitants, clearing, draining, 

 and building. Here, however, we are at once confronted with a vast 

 amount of reckless destruction, wholesale waste of economic products, 

 and utterly needless uglification of wide areas of country. It is, of 

 course, obvious that the nine million inhabitants of England in the year 

 1800, fed mainly on home-grown corn and meat, must have required a 

 larger area of cultivated land than the two million of 1200 a.d., or the 

 five million of 1600, and that the 76 million people of the United States 

 now require a vastly larger area than the three million at the time of the 

 War of Independence. As Mr. Lloyd Praeger says, in writing of Ireland, 

 " It is not easy to conjecture the primeval condition of the fertile portions 

 of this country before tillage, grazing, and drainage began to play their 

 part. We can conceive great woods and thickets, open park-like land, and 

 grassy downs ; but the details of the primitive vegetation we may never 

 know." f An attempt to sketch this primeval condition of England was 

 made by the late Mr. Elton in his "Origins of English History," and I 

 have myself attempted to carry out the same inquiry, rather more in 

 detail, in an address on" The Influence of Man upon the Flora of Essex," 

 delivered to the Essex Field Club in 1884. "Agriculture," as I then 

 insisted, " is essentially an interference with the balance of Nature. Man 

 deliberately endeavours to exterminate many plants which he puts to 



* South-Eastern Naturalist, vol. viii. pp. 48-60. 

 f Irish Topographical Botany, p. xxxiv. 



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