il 
To begin with our annual meeting in this place, on the 29th of 
January last year. I find it recorded that after partaking of the 
hospitality of the Principal of the College, in the shape of a 
hearty breakfast, the Antiquarians visited the Corinium Museum, 
the tessellated floors of which had just been laid. On this ocea- 
sion a hearty cheer greeted the noble Earl Bathurst, as a sponta- 
neous thank-offering for his liberality in rearing so substantial a 
building for the protection and preservation of these works of the 
past. To-day you were again invited to visit this Museum, and I 
feel sure again to pay the tribute of respect, as since last year his 
Lordship has liberally allowed me to furnish the Museum with 
the necessary cases, &c.; and at present we have seven handsome 
oak and glass cases, in which are arranged upwards of a thousand 
objects relating to the Roman occupation of the antient Corinium 
and its neighbourhood ; these I fee] assured you were struck with, 
not from their intrinsic value, nor from their beauty of form, 
though there is much that is striking in this respect, but from 
the many articles they contain of domestic use; a circumstance 
which you will understand if you examine a plan (suspended on 
the walls) of the dwellings which I excavated in 1852, as in these 
rooms were found the Statue of the Deity and his Altar. The 
living room with its valuable fictilia, some so prized as to have 
come down to us with the rivets by which its antient possessor 
had kept together its fractured portions; its ornaments of armille 
and jibule, as perfect in form as when they first formed a tribute 
of affection or a sign of ostentation. The dividers (compasses) of 
the draughtsman—the shears, which did duty as scissors to the 
Roman matron—and the oyster knife, so like our own as to show 
us that we have now no better mode of opening the “ refractory 
bivalves,” as Albert Smith calls them, than was to be found as 
much as 15 centuries ago. These, with cutlery, together with 
the hone-stones upon which it was sharpened, have only here been 
referred to, to show that the Collection of Antiquities in the Cori- 
nium Museum is particularly valuable as explaining to us some 
facts connected with the inner life of this interesting people, 
whilst, at the same time, we should feel thankful to them for 
having introduced to, and left among us, so many articles tending 
to advance our civilization. © 
Pardon this digression—if, as Mr. Bowly would say, we have 
been pursuing the wrong fox, we were soon led in the right direc- 
tion by the Noble Proprietor of Oakley Park, who headed us 
through the park glades until we joined the Agricultural party at 
his Lordship’s new farm buildings; here the whole machinery 
was set in motion by the powerful engine completed last year, 
and the Geologists examined the weil-sinking through the Great 
Oolite into the Fuller’s Earth, a depth of 140 feet. The whole 
of this shaft was carried through beds of a more or less porous 
oolite, without a break either lithological or paleontological, a 
circumstance which gave rise to some discussion between Mr. 
Hull, of the Ordnance Geological Survey, and the Secretary—the 
