ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING. 



26th January, 1887. 



The President, Professor W. J. Stephens, M. A.,F.G.S., in the Chair. 



President's Address. 



The Society has now completed the Twelfth Year of its existence, 

 and has already issued Ten Yearly Volumes, the first having been 

 found sufficient to contain the whole work of the two years of its 

 infancy. The Address which I now, according to custom, deliver 

 upon our Twelfth Anniversary will complete the Eleventh, which 

 however will be known as the First of the Second Series. There 

 are many and obvious advantages in breaking up an indefinite 

 succession into convenient sections ; and such an arrangement 

 has consequently met with very general adoption. 



There is no such special virtue in the 10, that Ten Volumes 

 should always compose a section, or determine a series ; but yet it 

 has been very frequently preferred to other numbers, and is at least 

 as old as the time of Pliny, the Historian, who divided his otherwise 

 interminable work into Decades of Ten Books each. 



Every Anniversary Meeting is accompanied with a melancholy 

 retrospect over the continually increasing number of comrades, 

 friends, or associates who have deceased within the memory of the 

 survivors. In some instances, as for instance in the famous 

 Waterloo Banquet, the number of these survivors themselves 

 soon began to diminish with startling rapidity, year by year, since 

 there were none to succeed to the empty places. It is not so with 

 a Corporation or Society such as ours. Under our conditions 



