Address. 137 



complete work. Need he illustrate that by reminding them of the 

 many and most valuable contributions to their pages made by their 

 honoured member, the Rev. Canon Jackson? And how important 

 some of these topographical monographs were would occur to any- 

 one who turned his thoughts to the admirable papers that had been 

 written on some of the mysterious problems bequeathed to them — 

 the men of the historical age — by the unknown builders of Avebury 

 and Stonehenge. In so far as these various descriptions, as well of 

 buildings as of other objects equally interesting, had inspired the 

 Society with the desire to visit and inspect the objects themselves, 

 the Association had certainly fulfilled, and was annually fulfilling, 

 one of the great purposes tor which it was founded. But the 

 archaeological interest attaching to localities could, even in Wiltshire, 

 be, after a time, exhausted, for the places that Association visited 

 in a three days' ramble covered an appreciable space on a county 

 map, and, when the whole map had been filled up, it had been 

 found necessary for the Association to step over the county border 

 and draw honey from flowers that grew in neighbouring counties, 

 as that day they did in what had been called the garden of England 

 — Dorsetshire. He would ask whether it would not be better to 

 hold their Meetings less frequently, to make them biennial, or 

 possibly triennial, and to announce for a considerable time in ad- 

 vance the locality at which the next assembling of the Association 

 should take place, and so to invite a more detailed scrutiny of some 

 of the objects most worth studying in the district to be visited. 

 How much there was to be seen and studied in this minute way in 

 any locality, even in a single parish, it needed only a glance at 

 their Secretary's admirable work — the hundred square miles round 

 Avebury— to render evident. He was sure the Society would lament at, 

 and condole with its Secretary and his eo^/afiora^ewr^at Marlborough on, 

 the great loss that archaeology sustained in the destruction by fire of the 

 greater part of the impression of that important book. He hoped the 

 patriotism of the county would render possible a new edition rising 

 from the ashes of the old one. It might be well if in their future 

 Meetings an organised and thoroughly scholar-like study of one or 

 a £ew important objects could be arranged for some time beforehand 



