“ANNUAL ADDRESS 
TO THE 
COTTESWOLD NATURALISTS’ FIELD CLUB; 
BY 
E. B. WETHERED, F.G.8., President. 
(Read at Gloucester, April 23rd, 1901) 
PART I. FORMAL RECORD. 
Since our last Annual Meeting the British Empire has 
mourned the death of one of the most beneficent Sove- 
reigns that the world has ever seen. During her reign 
Science, Art and Literature have not only progressed as 
in no previous reign, but the means of acquiring knowledge 
has been placed within the reach of those who previously 
could not enjoy it. What we owe to the circumstances 
of her time has been well stated in the “ Times ” :— 
“Her reign coincides very accurately with a sort of 
second renaissance, an intellectual movement accom- 
plishing in a brief term more than had been done in 
preceding centuries. Since the days of Elizabeth there 
has been no such awakening of the mind of the nation, no 
such remarkable strides in the path of progress, no such 
spreading abroad of the British race and British rule over 
the world at large, as in the period covered by the reign 
whose end we now have to deplore. In art, in letters, in 
music, in science, in religion, and, above all, in the moral 
and material advancement of the mass of the nation, the 
Victorian age has been a time of extraordinary activity.” 
