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president’s address. 
as well as the proximity of the great ocean with its shore, — 
presents an almost unexampled field for the work of the scientific 
naturalist, — a field, too, whicli is constantly changing in accordance 
with the physical and other changes steadily going on in the district. 
With these great natural advantages, and with the great love for 
natural science, which is inherent in iN’orfolk men, I make bold to 
hope and prognosticate for this Society a prolonged and continuously 
useful career. We are glad to see its library growing, and its 
journalistic interchanges increasing. We are glad of the increasing 
importance of the position which it holds amongst kindred 
societies. We are all, I am sure, looking forward to the time when 
this, our Society, will meet- in a handsome airy room on the top of 
the Castle Hill ; when any student of any particular branch of this 
natural history will be able (on repairing to our Museum) to see 
not merely inaccessible specimens ranged three or four deep, but so 
displayed as to be available for study and examination ; Avhen 
lectures and demonstrations will be possible, because there will be 
sufficient room space to contain both the lecturer and his audience ; 
in short, when we in Norwich shall have a scientific centre worthy 
of the Museum and of the great reputation which this district has 
always held. 
What a happy change, too, when the old Castle of Norwich — 
the last of our three city prisons — shall exchange its human 
prisoners for forms, imprisoned indeed, but not human ; and 
intended only to enlarge and instruct and make more free the 
mind of man. And when Science and Art and the cultivation of 
the intelligence shall tend year by year, and ever more and more, to 
render real prisons less and less required. And when the moral 
sense and the force of cultivated public opinion shall suffice to 
reduce crime and ill-doing to its minimum. We gladly recognize 
how much has already been done, and we look forward with hope 
in both these directions to the good time coming. 
In now resigning this chair to my learned and distinguished 
successor, I can only trust that he will find his year of office as 
pleasant, and as profitable to himself, as the Members of this 
Society, and their excellent Secretary, have rendered mine to me. 
