ADDRESS OF THE RETIRING PRESIDENT, 



(CHANDOS WREN HOSKYNS, ESQ.,) 



R£AD AT THE ANNUAL MEETING, THURSDAY, MABCH 26, 1868. 



GENTLEMEN, — The survey of the past year's proceedings of the 'Woolhope 

 Field Club, which has usually formed the chief topic of that Parthian 

 demonstration concluding the term of presidential office, is now, by a very happy 

 arrangement of the Central Committee, assisted by the liberality of the Press, 

 presented to you in so detailed a form, photographed, as it were, from the 

 sunny life of each day's Field operations, that I should be occupying your time 

 improfitably by attempting to present even in miniature what is placed 

 before you elsewhere in full life size, and fixed in permanence on the pages 

 of the printed Transactions of the year. 



Indeed, if I were to act out my moribund character to the life, or rather 

 to the death, according to the modern pattern of a president under impeachment, 

 and end my term of office by what is called "making a clean breast of it" at 

 once, I am not sure, in view of the increasing number of scientific societies and 

 annual addresses exemplified during the period, whether I should not breathe a 

 hope that amongst the many revolutions in the political, the social, and the 

 scientific world, with which we seem to be specially contemporary — that the 

 whole generation of annual addresses may, like other ancient forms that have 

 fiilfilled the era of their utility, be gradually approaching a sort of Cataclysm 

 destined to relieve a double exhaustion at once, that of the speaker's matter *nd 

 the hearers' patience. 



