196 president's address. 



ADDRESS TO THE MEMBERS OF THE TYNESIDE 

 NATURALISTS' FIELD CLUB, 



BEAD BY THE PRESIDENT, GEORGE S. BRADY, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., ETC., 

 PROFESSOR OP NATURAL HISTORY IN THE DURHAM COLLEGE OF 

 SCIENCE, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, AT THE FORTY-SIXTH ANNIVER- 

 SARY, HELD IN THE LIBRARY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE NATURAL 

 HISTORY SOCIETY ON TUESDAY EVENING, MAY 17th, 1892. 



Lames and Gentlemen, — To decide upon a subject which is to 

 form the corner-stone of an anniversary address is seldom a very 

 easy task. And although, in the case of the Tyneside Field 

 Club, the difficulty is to a certain extent overcome by the rule 

 which prescribes to the President, in somewhat peremptory 

 terms, the duty of furnishing a report of the Meetings which 

 have been held during the year, it yet seems desirable that this 

 resume should be kept within somewhat narrow limits. Our 

 Club is now forty-six years old, and successive Presidents have 

 during all these years, mostly in very able fashion, been dis- 

 burdening their minds of such observations and reflections as 

 occurred to them in respect to the various places which have 

 been, over and over again, visited by the Club. But it is evi- 

 dent that a tale so often told tends to become wearisome. There 

 is nothing to be said respecting most of the Club's familiar 

 haunts — and what pleasant corner in and around the two coun- 

 ties is not by this time familiar to us ? — which has not already 

 Ijeen said time and again. Sometimes the orator has approached 

 his subject from the prosaic and matter-of-fact side, contenting 

 himself with recording the actual doings of the Club, their 

 botanical or zoological or geological, or even gastrononiical ex- 

 ploits, at the places of meeting; sometimes he has been saturated 

 with folk-lore, and has imparted to his address a flavour of this 

 character ; he may have been an antiquary and crammed us with 

 inscribed stones and altars and monumental brasses, — a student 

 of history, and told us of some of those stirring incidents which 

 fill the records of these border- counties " with sounds that echo 

 still," or a naturalist, who has recounted the doings of indivi- 

 dual members of the Club in days when — may I be allowed to 



