A HISTORY OF SUSSEX not characteristically southern, though certainly not arctic. The as- sociated plants include the oak, blackberry, dog-rose, bird-cherry, wild cherry, and the maple of Montpellier, the last being a small tree of the Mediterranean region, found also in central Europe, but extinct in Britain. The plants point to a climate sufficiently mild for forest trees such as these, and therefore too mild to allow of the formation of ice- foot. Bed 5 does not appear yet to have yielded fossils at Selsey, but deposits probably of the same age at Worthing, Shoreham and Brighton contain only common littoral shells such as inhabit the English Channel at the present day. West Wittering, near the western limit of the county, shows a still better exposure of peaty, estuarine loams with derived erratics, equivalent to beds 3 and 4 of the Selsey section. They yield quite an extensive series of land, freshwater and estuarine mollusca, flowering plants and mosses, as well as bones of elephant and rhinoceros. The lists are too long to reproduce; but among the mollusca are Corbicula Jiuminalis, Helix ruderata, and Hydrobia marginata, now extinct in Britain, as well as Helix lamellata, Succinea oblonga and Hydrobia similis, now having a restricted range and unknown living in Sussex. The forest trees include the holly, alder-buckthorn, sloe, wild cherry, cornel, elder, guelder-rose, wayfaring-tree, hazel, oak and sallow. The Montpellier maple has not yet been found ; but among the aquatic plants are two southern forms, Najas minor and N. graminea. A number of the plants are unrecorded elsewhere in the fossil state, and West Wittering has now yielded the largest flora of any Pleistocene deposit in Britain, or indeed in Europe.' It has been thought advisable to deal with these comparatively recent strata at somewhat greater length than with the older rocks, for the reason that a thorough understanding of the climatic and orographic changes involved is needed before we can explain the origin of the exist- ing fauna and flora of the county. Moreover, though the whole of the strata described up to this point have so far yielded no trace of the exist- ence of man, yet it must be recognized that elsewhere strata apparently of the same date do yield such evidence. Thus at any moment the glacial and interglacial deposits of Sussex may turn out to be of absorb- ing interest in relation to the vexed question of the antiquity of man. To summarize : We learn from records preserved in Selsey that on the Sussex coast a deposit of glacial origin is overlain by one yielding a tem- perate fauna and flora, this latter being without admixture of arctic species, but including a few southern forms. Above these fossiliferous strata lie stony and chalky loam and Coombe Rock, which, if the interpretation of the evidence is correct, indicate a recurrence of arctic conditions. The strata yielding evidence of a temperate climate seem therefore to belong to an ' interglacial ' mild episode. The next deposit to be described, known as the Coombe Rock or Brighton Elephant-bed, is a mass of almost unstratified angular flint and chalk detritus spread over many square miles of country and becoming ' The fullest list will be found in Rcid ' Origin of the Rritish Flora ' (1S99), pp. 94-6.
