2 
OCCURRENCE OF CHALKY BOULDER CLAY AT CHINGFORD. 
direction. Micheli (born 1679, died 1737) was of humble parent¬ 
age and entirely self-educated. He is said to have been of a 
most lovable and modest disposition. Owing to his great ability 
and enthusiasm for the study of plants, he became botanist 
to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and director of the botanic 
gardens in Florence. To defray the expense of preparing the 
plates for his book, Nova Plant arum Genera, he appealed 
for assistance to botanists throughout Europe. Among his 
friendly correspondents was Dr. Wm. Sherard, of Oxford, founder 
of the Sherardian chair of botanv in the University, from whose 
letters we learn of the efforts he made to obtain contributors 
amongst his friends to Micheli’s book. No doubt it was in. 
this way that Dr. Dale became one of the seventeen Englishmen 
whose names appear in the list of 193 patrons given in Nova 
Plantar uni Genera, patrons who, Micheli writes, “ made 
provision for the plates accompanying this work to be engraved 
on copper.” 
There is no reason to think that the plate dedicated to Dale 
and illustrating Mycetozoa was chosen to suit his tastes, although 
we know that he was so far interested in fungi that he supplied 
a list of them to his distinguished neighbour, John Ray, for the 
Historia Plantarum. 
NOTE ON THE OCCURRENCE OF CHALKY 
BOULDER CLAY AT CHINGFORD. 
By PERCY G. THOMPSON. 
[Read 28th November 1914.] 
RAVELLER’S Joy ” (Clematis vitalba, L.) has long 
X been known to held botanists as growing along the border 
of Bury Wood, Chingford, although it is to be found nowhere 
else in the present Forest district until one gets to the north 
and east of Epping town, when it occurs commonly in hedges 
on Boulder Clay soil (see Essex Naturalist, vi., 1892, p. 3). 
It is essentially a chalk-loving plant (“ most common on chalky 
soil,” says Hooker). 
I have long speculated, from its occurrence in Bury Wood, 
on the possibility of an unmapped and unsuspected patch of 
Boulder Clay existing in the Chingford district of the Forest. 
On a recent visit to Yardley Hill, Chingford, in September 
