TROPICAL ENGLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 260, 2 November 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

TROPICAL ENGLAND.

Two English women naturalists, Mrs. E. M. Keid and Miss M. E. J. Chandler, of Milford-on-Sea, after seven years 5 examination of the plant life remains found in the London clay, which has been conducted in close co-operation with the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, have concluded that England was once tropical, and that her tropical vegetation had travelled northwest from Malaya, via the Tethys Sea. This great semi-inland sea, more than 50,000 years ago stretched from Western Europe to Burma. Cinnamons, camphor plants, exotic water lilies and palms were then included in the natural vegetation, while sharks and turtles disported themselves in the mouth of the Thames, brought here by the Tethys Sea which, in its 6000 miles stretch, covered the areas from which such great mountains as the Himalayas, the Atlas and the Alps were afterwards reared. Mrs. Eeid is probably the greatest authority in the world on the classification of plants from their fossilised fruits and seeds. It is by this peculiarly difficult method that she has been able to trace in such detail Britain's plant life of so long ago. Most of her specimens have been obtained from the foreshore at Sheppey and Swale Cliff, Heme Bay. Both of these places come within the area of "London clay," which stretches from Essex to Hampshire, and represents the estuarial deposit of a single giant river. Of all the plant families identified, 43 p.c. are to-day either exclusively or almost entirely tropical, while 4G per cent are equally tropical and extra-tropical, and only 11 per cent are chiefly temperate. . Mrs. Reid's most significant discovery is, however, that nearly three-quarters of these families of fossil plants are to-day represented in "the very heart of tho East-Asian tropics, mainly in the Malay Islands." One family of conifers is now confined to the mountains of China and Japan, and English water lilies have been proved to be more closely related to Far Eastern types than to the water lilies of modern Europe.