TRANSACTIONS 
oF THE 
Philosophical Society of Victoria. 
Inaugural Address of the President, Captain Clarke, R.E., 
Surveyor-General, §c., &c. 
In accepting the office of your President, in now assuming the 
task of, for the first time, addressing your Association when 
launched on its course, I have been, not regardless of the 
responsibility I have taken upon myself, nor have I forgotten 
the absence of so many of those essential qualifications which 
would have rendered your selection less embarrassing to myself, 
or my address to you more worthy of the Society we seek to 
establish. / 
Not alone in the offshoots of the older world, but in the 
more ancient seats of learning, positions of this nature have 
customarily been occupied by men distinguished for their rank 
