4 



The Twenty -Eighth General Meeting. 



that his visit coincided with the meeting of the Wiltshire Archaeo- 

 logical Society, over which he was afraid to say how many years 

 back he had the privilege of presiding for three years. There was 

 another reason why he was particularly pleased to come to Malmes- 

 bury with the archaeologists, and that was because two years ago 

 when he was president of the British Archaeological Society's 

 meeting at Devizes, the only excursion he missed was the excursion 

 to Malmesbury. He unfortunately had other business which pre- 

 vented him joining the party that went from Devizes on that 

 occasion. He was very glad that the Wilts Archaeological Society 

 should have come to Malmesbury again, for he believed it had not 

 been there for 20 years. As to the report, though they had lost some 

 of their old original Members, which was a thing of course as time 

 went on which they must naturally expect, it was a subject of con- 

 gratulation that they had twenty new Members to record. And then 

 their finances had improved ; and he thought the statement of the 

 discoveries that had been made at Abury and at W^interbourne, where 

 other stones had been discovered by digging, showed the importance 

 of such county Societies as theirs. He had from the very first been 

 a Member of the Society, and had read that very interesting publi- 

 cation which had been alluded to, and which he was glad to say 

 was approaching its sixtieth number, which concluded the twentieth 

 volume. When he considered the intensely interesting matter 

 which was contained in those volumes, not only respecting archaeo- 

 logy, but as regarded the natural history of the county, and 

 the valuable materials that were contributed to the history, as 

 well as the archaeology of the county, particularly in the papers of 

 Canon Jackson, which were the result of his researches at Longleat, 

 he felt that he always rose from reading those publications with a sense 

 of the importance of such a local association as theirs, in accumulating 

 materials for the history of our county. He was convinced that there 

 was a great deal more that could be done in the way in which Canon 

 Jackson had been employed at Longleat, amongst other libraries 

 and records even in the county of Wilts, and he thoroughly com- 

 mended to those who had not joined the Society the importance of 

 doing so,, for it was doing a great work in elucidating the history of 



