274 



The Twenty -Ninth General Meeting. 



The President then delivered his 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



I have never ceased to wonder how I came to be in this chair 

 to-day. My only point of contact with archaeology has been one 

 far removed from the region in which Britons strove with Jutes, 

 and Engles or Englishmen with Dane or Norman hosts. To find 

 myself at all at home I should have to go behind the days of fossil 

 Silchester, to those when Greece and her pupil in art — -Rome — were 

 living intellectual powers, and to the perhaps narrow department of 

 their arts, the engraved gems in which they have made beautiful 

 stones more beautiful, as speaking to the mind as well as to the eye, 

 by animating them with the engraved legends of Greek mythology 

 and hero-worship. But I fear that a discussion of engraved gems, 

 my only archaeological study, would be out of place here. So, in 

 my perplexity two or three weeks ago, I asked my old friend and a 

 more worthy predecessor in this office for his advice. Sir John 

 Lubbock gave it at once. The Wilts Archseo logical Society, he 

 said, is also a Natural History Society. Tell them something about 

 flints. Well this, then, is what I propose to do : and when we look 

 round us from any of those old-world " Castles/'' whose ramparts 

 crown so many points of vantage on our chalk downs, whether in 

 Wilts, Berks, or Hampshire, and see in the foreground of the 

 panorama the rolling stretches of English turf, that grows and so 

 grows only on our English chalk, I cannot help thinking that flint, 

 the ubiquitous denizen of our chalk, ought to have some interest for 

 all of us ; at any rate, if we trample it under our feet or grind it to 

 dust by our chariot wheels, we may for half-an-hour try to exalt it 

 into an object of interest. 



Well, then, I am going to speak to you of flints not as the rolled 

 -pebble, an alien and wanderer rolled about through ages in river-beds 

 and on sea-beaches, or finding temporary rest from its wanderings 

 in some gravel-bed, nor yet of flints as the favourite and favoured 

 material for the implements of savage man, but flint as we find it in 

 repose in the quiet layers of its first home, the chalk. Our lamented 

 friend, Mr. Stevens, has made the archaeological aspects of this 



