To begin with our annual meeting in this place, on the 29th of 

 January last year. I find it recorded that after partaking of the 

 hospitality of the Principal of the College, in the shape of a 

 hearty breakfast, the Antiquarians visited the Corinium Museum, 

 the tessellated floors of which had just been laid. On this occa- 

 sion a hearty cheer greeted the noble Earl Bathurst, as a sponta- 

 neous thank-offering for his liberality in rearing so substantial a 

 building for the protection and preservation of these works of the 

 past. To-day you were again invited to visit this Museum, and I 

 feel sure again to pay the tribute of respect, as since last year his 

 Lordship has liberally allowed me to furnish the Museum with 

 the necessary cases, &c. ; and at present we have seven handsome 

 oak and glass cases, in which are arranged upwards of a thousand 

 objects relating to the Roman occupation of the antient Corinium 

 and its neighbourhood ; these I feel assured you were struck with, 

 not from their intrinsic value, nor from their beauty of form, 

 though there is much that is striking in this respect, but from 

 the many articles they contain of domestic use ; a circumstance 

 which you will understand if you examine a plan (suspended on 

 the walls) of the dwellings which I excavated in 1852, as in these 

 rooms were found the Statue of the Deity and his Altar. The 

 living room with its valuable fictilia, some so prized as to have 

 come down to us with the rivets by which its antient possessor 

 had kept together its fractured portions ; its ornaments of armill<e 

 and fibula, as perfect in form as when they first formed a tribute 

 of affection or a sign of ostentation. The dividers (compasses) of 

 the draughtsman the shears, which did duty as scissors to the 

 Roman matron and the oyster knife, so like our own as to show 

 us that we have now no better mode of opening the " refractory 

 bivalves," as Albert Smith calls them, than was to be found as 

 much as 15 centuries ago. These, with cutlery, together with 

 the hone-stones upon which it was sharpened, have only here been 

 referred to, to show that the Collection of Antiquities in the Cori- 

 nium Museum is particularly valuable as explaining to us some 

 facts connected with the inner life of this interesting people, 

 whilst, at the same time, we should feel thankful to them for 

 having introduced to, and left among us, so many articles tending 

 to advance our civilization. 



Pardon this digression if, as Mr. Bowly would say, we have 

 been pursuing the wrong fox, we were soon led in the right direc- 

 tion by the Noble Proprietor of Oakley Park, who headed us 

 through the park glades until we joined the Agricultural party at 

 his Lordship's new farm buildings ; here the whole machinery 

 was set in motion by the powerful engine completed last year, 

 and the Geologists examined the well-sinking through the Great 

 Oolite into the Fuller's Earth, a depth of 140 feet. The whole 

 of this shaft was carried through beds of a more or less porous 

 oolite, without a break either lithological or palseontological, a 

 circumstance which gave rise to some discussion between Mr. 

 Hull, of the Ordnance Geological Survey, and the Secretary the 



