30 
The Presidential Address . 
felled trees being probably often allowed to block up stream¬ 
lets. 57 
Apart from this indirect influence upon our flora, it is to 
the Romans that we probably owe the first intentional intro¬ 
duction of new trees. To them we probably owe 58 the Chest¬ 
nut, the Sycamore, the Box and the Laurel, together with the 
Walnut, Pear, Medlar, Quince, Damson, Peach, Cherry, 
Mulberry, Fig, and Yine, though it is impossible to say 
whether some of these introductions date from the Roman 
occupation or only from the missionaries of the fifth century. 
Thus Professor Earle, from a study of early English plant- 
names, says 69 “we seem led to the conclusion that the Saxon 
acquaintance with Roman botany must be dated as high as 
the Conversion, even if it be not the heritage of a provincial 
Roman culture.” The Roman remains in our own county 
testify to the wide diffusion of general culture, art, manu¬ 
factures, and luxury, under the Empire ; whilst the works of 
Columella, Pliny, and Dioscorides, which belong to this 
period, tell us of the extent of the Roman knowledge of 
agriculture, botany, and medicine. Myself, I think it most 
probably to the period of occupation that we owe the trees I 
have mentioned, only one of which, the Pear, may, I think, 
have previously existed in the island, in a wild state. To 
this period belong also the Parsley, which has become a 
common garden escape during the last hundred years, the 
Opium Poppy, which they cultivated for its oil, the Turnip, 
the Rape, and the Cole-wort, besides a number of un¬ 
intentional introductions of corn-field weeds. Growing a 
variety of crops in Italy and Gaul, and having perhaps 
57 “ The felled wood was left to rot on the surface, small streams were 
choked up in the levels ; pools formed in the hollows ; the soil beneath, 
shut up from the light and air, became unfitted to produce its former 
vegetation ; but a new order of plants, the thick water-mosses, began to 
spring up; one generation budded and decayed over the ruins of another, 
and what had been an overturned forest became, in the course of years, 
a deep morass.”—Hugh Miller, ‘ Lectures on Geology.’ 
58 Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib. xv., c. 25. Pearson, op. cit., p. 54. 
59 ‘ English Plant Names from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century,’ 
1880, p. liv. 
