4 Anniversary Address. 



rails, or eternally building up ambitious schemes that a 

 single gust of ill fortune may wreck, as the storm tears to 

 atoms the glittering silken web of the spider, cannot under- 

 stand all the much ado of naturalists about nothing. May 

 this not be chiefly because they have never personally 

 dipped into such pursuits, have never thrown themselves 

 into contact with the living power of nature speaking 

 through the green ferns, the waving boughs, the varied hues 

 and forms of the vegetable world, the humming insects with 

 all their curious organisms, the singing birds with multiform 

 methods of attack and defence, the habits of the animated 

 tribes, and the wonderful mental endowment which enables 

 them to maintain existence in their world, which seems to 

 have no law but individual will. Along with all these the 

 naturalist enjoys the music of the life around him, the gush 

 and gurgle and dash of the running stream, the contrast of 

 green woodland with the grey moorland, the calm repose of 

 the stable hills, filling eye and ear and other unnamed 

 senses with exquisite enjoyment, calling forth new sympa- 

 thies with the life around him, disenthralling his spirit from 

 antiquated bondage and giving him continual sips of that 

 fine freedom of spirit which comes from looking into nature 

 with one's own eyes and reason." Here is fine writing, 

 much finer than anything I could possibly say in praise of 

 our pursuits. The other passage is about Geology. He 

 says, " Geology is the only science that seems to be over- 

 looked by those ardent explorers, and this we may be 

 allowed to regret, as the Old Red and most of the Silurian 

 in the counties of Berwick, Roxburgli, and Selkirk are 

 fossiliferous, but the extent to which they are so, and the 

 stratigraphical relations of the respective stages of these 

 formations are yet to be worked out by patient investiga- 

 tion of resident observers. The valley of the Jed from 

 Dovesford upwards, and that portion of the Slitrig, south of 

 Stobs Castle, and up to the Cheviots, as well as Silurian 

 areas south-west and north-east of these lines, contain 

 numerous bands of upper Silurian Shales, crammed with 



