65 



Anniversary Address of the President, 

 R, I. MuECHisoN, Esq. F.R.S. 



Gentlemen, 

 The past year has been favourable to the duration of the life of 

 geologists, for we have lost no one working member. Some, how- 

 ever, of our Associates have passed from this stage of existence, and 

 I will briefly allude to three, whose position and literary talents, or 

 connexion with our pursuits, seem to me to claim notice. 



In the first place, I have to pay a tribute to the late President 

 of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Earl of Munster, the compa- 

 nion of my boyhood and the friend of maturer years. Educated 

 at the Royal Military College, and with no other advantages than 

 those which fall to the lot of other young soldiers, George Fitz- 

 clarence early shared in the bitter hardships and final triumph 

 of the Corunna campaign ; and, taking an active part in the Penin- 

 sular war which followed, he was repeatedly wounded and once 

 taken prisoner, OAving to the gallant exposure of his person. The 

 esteem of his great commander, thus won in the field, attended Lord 

 Munster to the close of his life. Without tracing the career of my 

 friend in India, where he served on the staff' of the Governor-Gene- 

 ral, or following him through his travels in Egypt, where he explored 

 the pyramids with Salt and Belzoni, I may say that with his acute 

 and observant mind, he there imbibed a taste for Eastern art and 

 story; and, taking a comprehensive view of those couQtries and their 

 people, he laid the foundation of that acquaintance with Oriental 

 subjects which formed the chief object of his subsequent researches. 

 The military annals of the nations of the East naturally attracted so 

 enthusiastic a soldier, and fifteen years have now elapsed since he 

 first conceived the plan of a history of Oriental Castrametation or 

 the science of encampments from the earliest ages. With the pro- 

 gress of his inquiries, however, and with fresh materials, his views 

 enlarged ; and another work on a gigantic scale was commenced, 

 which was designed to embrace the tactics and warfare of all Ori- 

 ental nations, interspersed with ethnical notices from the earliest 

 records down to the wars of British India. Some idea may be formed 

 of the vastness of this undertaking, unhappily arrested by the death 

 of its projector, from the fact, that the materials he had already 

 collected with unwearied industry, and sometimes at great expense, 

 in the libraries and archives of Europe and Asia, fill 2000 quires of 

 folio paper; exclusive of a vast store of rare plates and detached 

 memoranda bearing on his subject. Let us hope that the accom- 

 plished young scholar, Dr. Sprenger, whom his Lordship selected 

 to translate many of these documents from the Arabic and other 

 Eastern languages, or some fitting member of the Asiatic Society, 

 may be found to prepare for publication the most important of the 

 results at which he had arrived. So widely were his correspondents 

 distributed, that they extended to Orenburg and Astrachan, the 

 remotest limits of the Russian empire ; and in the University of 

 Kasan, where, I would observe, more knov/ledge of the East is to 



