35 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
TO THE 
CARLISLE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY AND FIELD 
NATURALISTS’ CLUB. 
(Delivered at Carlisle, December 30th, 1879.) 
By ROBERT FERGUSON, M.P. (PRESIDENT.) 
When I was first invited by your Secretary to address you, it 
was naturally a matter of consideration with me in what manner I 
should speak to you upon a subject of which I have made no 
special study, and in regard to most of the details of which many 
of your members are doubtless better instructed than I can be. 
But then it occurred to me that any one who has been in the 
world so long as I have, must, in the course of his life, have 
observed some things, and read of some things, and thought of 
some things which, though without any special scientific training, 
it might be of interest for him to communicate, even if it were 
mainly only in the way of suggestion. 
On this principle, then, I propose to address you, giving you, 
as far as occasion offers, my own ideas and impressions. I may be 
a little discursive, and I may be occasionally subject to scientific 
correction, but I have thought that it would be, on the whole, the 
most agreeable, and possibly the most useful course of proceeding. 
But, in the first place, I think it will be in accordance with an 
address of this sort that I should endeavour to give you—though, 
necessarily, for the most part at second-hand—some account of 
the results which have been obtained in that particular field of 
investigation towards which the attention of scientific observers has 
