pbesident's address. 225 



ADDRESS TO THE MEMBERS OF THE TYNESIDE 

 NATURALISTS' FIELD CLUB, 



READ BY THE PRESIDEKT, ALEXANDER S. STEVENSON, ESQ., AT THE 

 THIRTY-EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY MEETING, HELD IN THE LECTURE 

 ROOM OF THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, NEW- 

 CASTLE-UPON-TYNE, ON FRIDAY, MAY 23ed, 1884. 



Ladies and Gentlemen, — I desire to thank you for the high 

 honour you conferred upon me at the last annual meeting of this 

 Club. I know well how small my claim is to sit in the chair of 

 the President of the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club. It was 

 proposed to me a few years ago, and I declined the honour, be- 

 cause I shrank from its responsibilities. And now that I have 

 accepted it, I am bound to say that I owe the position, not to 

 any scientific qualifications of my own, entitling me to hold high 

 office in the Club, but to the pressure kindly put upon me by 

 some of my old friends amongst the members, and to your kind 

 indulgence. 



During the past year six Field Meetings have been held by 

 the Club. In addition to these two Evening Meetings took place 

 in connection with the Natural History Society of Northumber- 

 land and Durham. Of these meetings, and especially of the 

 Field Meetings, it now becomes my duty to endeavour to give 

 you some account. 



The First Field Meeting was held on the 28th of May, at 

 Talkin Tarn, and down by that portion of the Gelt which lies 

 below the railway or Middle Gelt bridge and the Low Gelt 

 bridge. Here the river leaves its rocky boundary, and winding 

 through a flat country for about two miles it falls into the Ir- 

 thing, neax its junction with the Eden. Fourteen members 

 started by the early train, and breakfasted at the Beck Brow Inn 

 near Brampton. Afterwards they took the shortest cut to Talkin 

 Tarn, a small and pleasantly-situated piece of water, accumulated 

 in a basin or hollow, and nearly surrounded, on one side, by the 

 peculiar rounded mounds or hills of drift-gravel, and to the 



