The Presidential Address. 
15 
The thin layer of clay and flints, covered with grass and 
dotted with Juniper, Clematis, the Eock Meadow-Eue 
(Thalictrum saxatile ), the Pasque-flower (Anemone pidsatilla), 
and other characteristic plants, that overlies the Chalk, has 
probably never within the period under consideration been 
more wooded than it is at present. W ith this exception and 
that of the maritime flats saturated with brackish water and 
exposed to the sea-breeze, the whole country was on the 
arrival of man almost certainly one unbroken virgin forest. 9 
This forest indeed, may even have extended to the very banks 
of the Thames, the Lea, the Blackwater, and the Stour, those 
rivers, as we gather alike from the submerged forest from 
Plumstead to Grays, and from the Deneholes of Purfleet, 
running perhaps at relatively lower levels, i. e., the country 
not having as yet sunk to its existing elevation. At the com¬ 
mencement of history, however, before existing embank¬ 
ments, there is no doubt that the lowlands of the valle} s and 
estuaries of the rivers I have named were tidal flats, destitute 
of vegetation, or producing only the Aster, Sea Laveudei, 
Thrift, Sea Plantains and Asparagus of our eastern coasts. 10 
Man has but slightly affected our maritime flora, whilst those 
of inland swamps and fresh-water have been diminished 
perhaps by his drainage operations ; but have been but 
slightly added to through his agency. 
The trees of this primeval Essex forest were the Oak, 11 
9 See “ The President’s Inaugural Address," by Raphael Meldola, 
F.R.A,S., F.C.S., Ac., Trans. Essex Field Club, vol. i., p. 8. 
10 “Whatever may be the date of the mighty embankments which have 
given its present form to the river channel, there can be no doubt that 
they did not exist in the time of Claudius. Those vast tracts known as 
the Isle of Dogs, the Greenwich Marshes, the West Ham and Plumstead 
Marshes, &c. (which are now about eight feet lower than high-water), 
were then extensive slobs covered with water at every tide. The water 
below London was then an enormous estuary, extending from the hills 
or hard sloping banks of Middlesex and Essex to those of Surrey and 
Kent, with one head towards the valley of the Thames, and another 
head towards the valley of the Lea. Sir George Amy, Athenaeum, 
No. 1688 (1859.) 
11 The Oak can be traced from the oldest post-glacial submerged 
forests, and from Dish peat-bogs contemporary with the Megaceros , 
through the times of Druidism to the age when our place-names mamly 
