ADDRESS. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Society : 



It is a touching, and to some of you, perhaps, famihar 

 incident related of a celebrated English traveller,* whose 

 genius and misfortunes have long closely allied him with 

 every human sympathy. He was engaged upon his first 

 adventurous enterprise into a distant and unknown land. 

 He had penetrated the interior solitudes of Africa. He 

 was in the midst of the vast deserts of a barbarous clime. 

 He was hundreds of miles away from the very outskirts 

 of civilization, and surrounded on every side by the beasts 

 of the wilderness, and by men scarcely less ferocious. 

 He had suffered every privation and every ill. He was 

 alone in the dismal waste, with a worn and faihng body 

 and a sinking mind. It was while the chance of life 

 appeared a thing almost too hopeless for conjecture, and 

 a thousand natural emotions thronged upon his soul ; 

 while the present seemed to crowd into its narrow hour 

 the accumulated memories of all the past, and offered 

 him but the prospect of a miserable death upon the bar- 

 ren sands, for the home which he had left with such eager 

 and buoyant expectations, and the loved and lovely things 

 he was to behold no more ; it was at this moment of 

 despondency and distress, that an object caught his eye, 



* Park. 



