whose warm sympathy and cordial co-operation with the work of the Society, and whose generous hospitality on the occasion of the annual gathering at Salisbury in 1865, will be fresh in the recollection of all the members of the Society.

"With regard to finance, it will be enough to say that our funds have increased to £270 from about £250, which was the sum announced in last year's report as then in hand; and this, notwithstanding that the Society has engaged in an extra work of publication beyond the ordinary Magazine. For in addition to two numbers of the Magazine which have been issued this year (reaching to the thirty-fourth number, and beginning the twelfth volume of that publication), your Committee desires to call your particular attention to the first part of the volume on the Blackmore Museum, which we have printed during this year, and which has been gratuitously circulated amongst the members of the Society, a publication containing papers of extraordinary archæological interest, as well as recording a brief history of the Museum and its inauguration in the autumn of 1867, when its munificent founder, Mr. William Blackmore, entrusted its care to his native city of Salisbury.

"The Museum and Library of our Society at Devizes have been enriched by sundry benefactions, which have been acknowledged in the Magazine; one of the last and not the least interesting of which is the gift, by Major Perry Keene, of the original inquisition on the body of Ruth Pierce of Devizes Market-cross celebrity.

"Your Committee at the same time desires again to remind you that the want of a suitable building as a Museum has again necessitated the rejection of many offered gifts; and we have within the last few days been compelled, for lack of available space, to decline the generous proposal of contributing to our archæological and natural history collections objects which were too bulky for us in our present straightened space to stow away.

"Your Committee, in concluding this report, desires again to commend to your active and continued co-operation the work of the Society; assuring you that neither the natural history nor the archæology of the county is by any means exhausted, and remind

1

ing you of the very appropriate motto adopted from the first by our Society,

'Multorum manibus grande levatur onus.'"

The Report having been adopted and ordered to be printed, the officers of the Society were re-elected, with the following additions. Mr. E. C. Lowndes of Castle Combe, to be added to the VicePresidents; the Rev. E. Barnwell, as a member of the Council; and as additional Local Secretaries, the Rev. T. A. Preston, for Marlborough; Mr. Brine, for Shaftesbury, or rather the portion of Wilts bordering on that town; Mr. Kinneir, for Swindon; Mr. George Noyes, for Chippenham, and Mr. Forrester, for Malmesbury.

These appointments having been confirmed by the meeting, and the formal business of the Society disposed of, the President's address followed :

SIR JOHN AWDRY said a request had been put in print that he would deliver an address upon this occasion. He had however addressed the Society at considerable length at a former meeting; and as to their general objects, and the local matters of general interest within the county, he had said then more fully than he was disposed to repeat what were his views upon the subject. The general idea of the Society was this-to follow up the history, natural and human, of the county, and of the subjects connected with it. He used the words natural and human advisedly, because they were an Archæological and Natural History Society, and secondly, because the two branches of the Society connected themselves in this way:-Inorganic nature was first created, afterwards organic, and every intelligent reader of the first chapter of Genesis, be he a Darwinian or not, must see, that the creation as there described, was a progressive one, of which Scripture and geology both tell us that man was its final work. Therefore from the history of material creation we come down to that of the existence and condition of man upon this earth. We heard a great deal about pre-historic monuments and records; the word pre-historic is inaccurate, for as far as they lead to any sound inference as to the former condition and progress of man they are strictly historical. They are not indeed annals or chronicles, that is narratives of past events. These

(we agree with Sir G. C. Lewis) are nothing unless they can be traced to contemporary authority. For instance, the pyramids of Egypt-whatever was found in the rubbish heaps upon the Danish coasts-whatever implements were found in the gravel-pits, or the barrows of this country or of France and which are attracting daily increasing attention as records of the early condition of mankind -these were historic monuments if they were anything; or to take a more popular instance, if we regard as fabulous the story of Romulus and Remus, of the wolf and the vultures, of Numa and Egeria, of Servius Tullius and the Tarquins; yet there is material evidence of insular eminences rising out of the swamps on the south side of the Tiber, fit to be the fastnesses of outlaws. Then in the dyke defending the promontories cut off from the nearest table-land, we have evidence of a larger and more settled population, probably of Latin and Sabine origin. In the Cloaca Maxima, the great drain, and in the religious system, prevailing through the period of the subsequent republic, we have proof of an interval of Etruscan dynasty, and Etruscan civilization. All these things are as truly historical, though not annalistic, as the Annual Register or the Times.

Coming to our own county, Sir John reminded the meeting that they were about to have a paper read upon the pit dwellings near Salisbury, and that there were in the Blackmore Museum many interesting monuments of ancient times, some of which had lately been found in the gravel or clay existing near Salisbury. Then they had Avebury-a vast but rude work; Stonehenge, a large, and more accurately executed work, but entirely without mouldings -all of which things were material with regard to the works of man in bygone ages.

There seem to be four grades of historical criticism, or want of criticism. 1st. Blind and indiscriminating acceptance. 2ndly. Equally crude and unenquiring incredulity. 3rdly. The simple omission of what is thought incredible, and retension of the rest, with a colouring of 18th century ideas, without enquiring how far the incredible facts were essential to the story or to the credit of the narrator as to the rest. Of the last grade, that of really critical en

quiry I may give an instance (without having myself verified it), in Mr. Jackson's curious paper, in which he connects the stones of Carnack with the legend of St. Ursula and the 11,000 British virgins. The story of their being shipwrecked at Cologne is of course ridiculously false. But he says that a competitor for power during the Roman empire (many centuries before the date of the fable), actually raised an army in Britain and conveyed it to Gaul. That the men settled in Armorica, now Brittany, and sent for some of their countrywomen as wives. That they embarked but met with calamity on the Coast of Armorica. And that the rows of stones there set are about eleven, and were set up as monuments to them.

After dwelling upon this part of the subject at some length, in the course of which Sir John observed that every man in his own particular neighbourhood might contribute a considerable amount of information by the careful observation of details-trivial perhaps in many cases, but in some most valuable,—he alluded to the theory laid down by Mr. Fergusson that all British monuments were subsequent to the Romans, and which, however unsound, derived some countenance from the above story of St. Ursula. Sir John said that since their last meeting at Hungerford investigations had taken place at Silbury Hill, at which Mr. Fergusson was present, when the idea that the hill was built upon the Roman road was entirely disproved, the true line of road having been thoroughly ascertained to the south of it.

With regard to the particular locality of Chippenham Sir John said it was situated between the slope of the oolite, the Cotswold district, on the one side, and of the escarpments of the chalk and green sand beds on the other. All this part of the country appeared in ages gone by, to have been one great lake from Cricklade on the one side, to the neighbourhood of Trowbridge on the other, and in later times when the water had partly escaped through the Bradford chasm, there had been several lakes in the neighbourhood; the whole country from Tytherton to Dauntsey is an evident lake bottom of loam with gravel under. This must have at one time been dammed by the ridge of Oxford clay running along the London

road from Chippenham. Again, in Lackham woods he had himself met with the remains of a pebble beach,

Standing, as Chippenham did, on a ridge, in the middle of the district, with a comparatively steep back to the river which ran on three sides of it, it must in Saxon times have been a very defensible place. He was not going to open Mr. Poulett Scrope's controversy; but if any of them in going from Corsham to Castle Combe tomorrow, were sufficiently well mounted to go round by Slaughterford, they would see one of the most beautiful bits of country in the neighbourhood, and in the village of Slaughterford they would find the dwarf-elder which was said to have sprung from the blood of the Danes.

Alluding to the architecture of the country, Sir John said that although there were parts of England where real Roman buildings existed, he did not know of any such in this county. But there was one remarkable building at Bradford-on-Avon-small and not very striking, to which no date could be assigned later than the Saxon period. Of this building which was situated close to the parish church, and was now used for the purposes of a free school, Mr. Jones had given an admirable description in a paper published in a former number of the Wiltshire Archæological Magazine;1 and if anything practical could be done to secure so perfectly unique a monument from destruction, it would be a great point not only in our local history, but in the history of the building art in England through the middle ages. In regard to the architecture of their own immediate neighbourhood, he need not say much. The parish church of Chippenham had some Norman points in it, but not to a great extent: it had an Early English spire, which was stated to have been once considerably higher than it now was. This was obviously impossible unless the whole was taken down and replaced. But the tower had certainly been altered at a very late period of Gothic art. The mouldings of the Spire were certainly original except where recently restored, and it would be a curious fact if it were proved that those who could not imitate them had yet taken them down and faithfully replaced them. As to the rest of

1 Vol. v., p. 247.