THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 263 



No other members havin(,r been proposed for ap.y office, tlie above gentlemen 

 stood elected as Members of the Council and Officers for the year 1904 and were 

 so declared by the Chan'man. 



The Hon. Secretary submitted the account of the Tea Fund lor the session 

 1903-4. 



jNIr. J. Avery proposed a vote of thanks to the Officers, This was seconded 

 by jNIr. Reader and adopted. 



The President then delivered his Annual Address, in which after some general 

 matters relating to the Club he treated of "The Natural History of Pyrites and 

 Gypsum, the chief minerals of Essex." [The address will be printed in full in a 

 future part of the EN.] 



iSIr. David Howard said that they would all thank their President for his 

 most interesting and practically useful paper. ]Mr. Rudler had treated a most 

 difficult subject in a most charming style. 



]\Ir. T. V. Holmes warmly seconded the vote of thanks, Avhich was carried 

 amid applause. 



Some remarks on the address were made by Mr. T. S. Dymond, F.C.S. 

 Afr. Dymond' s observations will probably be embodied in a paper to be read to 

 be read to the Club. 



The President briefly thanked the members tor their appreciation of his elTorts, 



THE 230th ORDINARY MEETING. 



This meeting was held in connection with the Annual Meeting, for the 

 confirmation of the minutes of the meeting on February 27th last, and for other 

 business. The President in the Chair. 



Chislehurst Caves. — ]Mr. T. V. Holmes exhibited some photographs 

 showing the interior of the Chislehurst Caves, which have recently been lighted 

 up, and are now open to public inspection. They were (he said) in the hillside 

 at the back of the Bickley Arms Hotel, and are about qu?.iter of a mile from the 

 Chislehurst Railwav Station. Similar workings in chalk were once visible a 

 little northward, at the western end of Camden Park, but are now closed to 

 inspection, buildings having been erected in front of them. The valley through 

 which the railway runs at Chislehurst, south of the tunnel, shows the chalk at the 

 base of the hillside eastward. Above it are the Thanet Sand, Woolwich Be^s, 

 and Blackheath Pebble Beds. Except at this spot there is no chalk at the 

 surface nearer than Lewisbam northward, and south of Orpington, in the opposite 

 direction. It has been worked at Chislehurst by means of galleries run 

 horizontally into the hillside for some hundreds of yards. As the top of 

 the chalk is but very slightly above the bottom of the valley, and as it appears at 

 the surface only through the existence of a slight anticlinal fold in the strata, it is 

 not surprising that the workers have here and there left too thin a roof 

 of chalk, and have thereby caused a downfall of the overlying Thanet 

 Sand. These falls of sand appear as conical mounds filling the gallery 

 from roof to floor, and have necessarily caused the excavators to turn 

 aside and alter the direction of the galleries near them, thereby 

 introducing an apparent complexity. But there appeared to him (from 

 what he had seen) to be no evidence of the existence of any vertical shafts 

 where these falls occurred, or of any intersection of deneholes at their base. Then 



