The President’s Address. 265 
Works takes notice of the progress that is making in the restoration 
of Cathedrals and Monuments, including the Crosses and those 
peculiar Round Towers about which so much has been written. 
This leads me to remark, what, indeed, must have often occurred 
to those who look at Archzological Societies seriously —that not only 
in Ireland, but in every other country, the first and the oldest ex- 
pression of thought, through the medium of art, is found in works 
connected with religion. In the mind of man, religious sympathies, 
doctrines and traditions, take a natural precedence of everything else. 
Be the country, or the period, what it may, heathen, Christian, 
classical, or medieval, the oldest monuments—even the rudest— 
seem to proclaim that a sense of over-ruling Power is natural to man. 
Time, of course, will wear everything out; but religious feeling is 
as old as man himself, and will last aslong. That feeling may have 
its periods of languor, but it has also its periods of energy, and 
nothing is more remarkable than the great, and, I may say, extra- 
ordinary efforts that have been made during the last half-century to 
restore to a proper condition the ecclesiastical buildings, great and 
small, from the Cathedral to the village Church, of Great Britain 
and Ireland. To say that this revival is solely owing to any one 
class of men, would be most unjust ; but it would be equally unjust 
if we did not say that a great deal of this energy of revival is owing 
to the stimulus that has been given to the public by the industry 
and activity of Archzological Societies. 
I must not omit to observe that since your meeting here at 
Warminster in 1856, besides the publication of several volumes 
connected with the history of this county, two museums have 
been established within it: one at Salisbury, chiefiy through the 
munificence of Mr. Blackmore, the other at Devizes, under the 
more immediate auspices of this Society. To the claims of these 
museums for support, I would take advantage of this occasion to 
eall the attention of the county. They have been established, and 
I sincerely hope that there may-be found among those who come 
after us, spirit enough to maintain them. 
Before I conclude I would say a few words upon a subject in which 
your proper President (Sir John Lubbock), whose place I am now 
