xii. Timehri. 



all regarded the occasion of its delivery —the visit of the Royal West Indian 

 Commission— as full of good augury for the future; but towards the end 

 of the year the Society had another special meeting at which we pointed 

 out that the major part of the Commission's conclusions and recommenda- 

 tions, or rather the want of a certain one among the latter, was fraught 

 with the gravest danger to the future of the colony. Neither of our 

 conclusions has proved to be correct. 



Those meetings were the forerunners of many which have since taken 

 place where the Governor of the colony in his capacity of Vice-Patron 

 of the Society has occupied the chair. I remember that I was 

 soundly rated by a very prominent member, a high Official of the 

 Government, at a meeting of the Directors for this innovation 

 which I had ventured to introduce. Of course Government officers in 

 presence of the Governor have to weigh their words and to restrain them, 

 and may not be justified in expressing their own opinions in full. But the 

 presence of the Governor in the chair at special meetings of the Society 

 has manifest advantages which far outweigh such objections. 



These popular meetings of the Society doubtless serve an 

 excellent purpose and being frequently illustrated by lantern 

 slides, have greatly added among the members of the Society to the 

 general knowledge of the back-lands of the colony and their human, 

 animal, and bird inhabitants. These meetings have already greatly 

 extended the general knowledge of the potentialities of the southern 

 section of the colony. 



On the other hand Georgetown now appears to be satisfied with 

 verbose discussions at popular meetings and in the newspapers as to the 

 future, and with picturing the time when the citizens will be able to 

 attend at a railway station to see otherB (not themselves) start for the 

 interior. In 1897 and in its immediately preceding years man}' citizens 

 ventured into the interior ; now with greatly increased facilities 

 fewer visit the interior and fewer still are willing to invest monej' 

 in its exploitation; the cry is now for others to do all this. 



There was a period in my life, which period terminated some 43 

 years ago. daring which 1 was required to do what certain reformers and 

 enthusiasts now regard as a waste of precious time -to study certain 

 dead languages in addition to a very few modern Onea I still retain some 

 faint memories of these studies and among them 1 remember a play 

 written by Aristophanes (Ornidis. the Birds) some 2,300 years ago. It is a 

 prophetic picture of the present state of this colony. We are living in a 

 Nephelokokkwijid and we fix our <^a/.e on another Nephelokokkuyia 

 to be founded by some one, at some time, and somewhere, iu the b ick of 

 beyond. Verily of recent years the great majority of us have been satis- 

 fied to be citizens of that delightful place of abode, that city of unfulfilled 

 schemes, unfruitful projects, fleeting energies, but of constant verbose 

 though misty discussions — Cloud-Cuckoo-Town. 



