The Presidential Address . 
18 
The Influence of Man upon the Floka of Essex. 
It may be doubted whether the whole of England has ever 
been simultaneously submerged since the Chalk period, if it 
were so even then. The great elevation, however, which 
seems to have marked the earlier part of the Glacial Epoch, 
followed as it was by a depression perhaps more than a 
thousand feet below existing levels, probably cut off the 
history of the flora represented by the phies and alders of the 
Cromer forest-bed and the Arctic Willow and Dwarf Birch of 
the Bovey-Tracey clay, or at most left as its only repre¬ 
sentatives those alpine species of North M ales with which 
we in Essex are not immediately concerned. The second 
continental period in that epoch is, therefore, probably that 
during which the bulk of our British flora migrated from 
what we may term its Germanic mainland, from the chalky 
uplands of the Ardennes, from the palaeozoic rocks of 
Belgium, from the alluvial plains of Lower Bhineland, from 
the forests of the Hartz and of Denmark. It is no part of 
my present purpose to attempt to determine the first appear¬ 
ance of man upon the scene. 
The savage known to science as Paleolithic man, the 
contemporary of our great extinct Thames Valley fauna, 
seems to have been wholly ignorant of agriculture, and may 
even have been entirely pre-glacial and have roamed through 
forests of the no-longer indigenous Scotch and Spruce Firs. 
It is with the far more modern Mongolian Neolith that we 
are now first concerned—the comparatively cultured race 
who came perhaps not more than ten or twelve thousand 
years ago from then lake-dwellings in Switzerland 6 and from 
6 See Elton, ‘Origins of English History,’ pp. 134—1B7, a most 
valuable work, from which I have gathered much information here 
utilised. Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ ed. i., p. 31 ^Figuier, 1 Primitive 
Man,’ p. 231; Herodotus, lib. v., cap. 16:—“ eweipvQv Pe y.cu r ovq ev r? 
sfai piuv, ah y.uToiKV^vovq- \v.p\cc kn'i arocvpuv l&vypsva, 
b play srrr,y.e tv ti/J-vv, tqobov ex rvq i,7reipov erreivw e^ovra fUyyeQvpy. 
Oixebo-I toiovtov TpoTrov, y.parsuv iy.oc.aroq ruv ixpiav 
yaXvfaq TS ev V ^enrarett, xoti Ovpvs y.arocTrocxTvq hit tuv txpiuv y.aru 
(pspovavs £<> rvv Xijtxnjv. Cameron, ‘ Across Africa, on huts on Lake 
Mohrya ; and Keller’s ‘ Lake-Dwellings, translated by 3. E. Lee. 
