309 
A FLOURISHING ULSTER FIELD CLUB. 
R. J. W. 
We have so many frends among the readers of your Maga- 
zine in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire that I 
think this screed might interest them. We are going as strong 
in the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club as we were when Praeger 
was Secretary many years ago. I am afraid many English 
Field Clubs are not very flourishing. I suppose they have 
•served their day and generation with you. They certainly 
have not here in Ireland, and I trust, when the Southern 
irregularities and mimic (and tragic, too, alas !) war is over, 
that the Dublin and Cork Clubs will do well again. Limerick 
Club is defunct, and some of its best men dead. 
It was really no joke carrying out B.N.F.C. excursions as 
things were. We had to drop one excursion this season. No 
owner would send a really good motor with us, as it meant 
going through a very bad area in a mountainous country, 
where we might have been held up and the char-a-banc burned. 
In the one I conducted in May, I had to take my party past the 
end of the worst sniping street in Belfast, my only route, too, 
past the very corner where men were killed almost daily for 
a time, and where the military cut off the street at times with 
barbed wire barricades (as they have another main street 
near me for the past three weeks). Fortunately that state of 
affairs has nearly passed away in Belfast. 
In view of the present state of Ireland, many members of 
English field clubs who have, in days gone by, joined the 
Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club in their excursions, may be 
glad to have some news of that Club, and its sister Society, the 
Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. Many 
of our readers may have thought that the political situation 
in Ireland would almost lead to an extinction of intellectual 
activity on the part of Natural History or Archaeological 
Societies. That this is not the case, so far as the Belfast 
Naturalists’ Field Club is concerned, many old friends of that 
Society in English Field Clubs will be glad to hear. If the 
Club had gone down in membership and general activity, 
owing to the difficulties caused by the war, and later by dangers 
of travel caused by the blowing up of trains and railway 
bridges, sniping, i.e., by the Republican irregulars, no one 
would have been surprised. Some English clubs have de- 
creased in membership for lesser causes ; but the reverse is 
the case with the Belfast Club ; it has gone up, and very 
much up. The membership is now about 460, 180 of whom 
in the Senior Section were elected in fourteen months ending 
May last. Of these 167 were obtained by the Hon. Treasurer, 
Mr. T. E. Osborne, alone, while an old ex-president proposed 
11 members for the Junior Section at one meeting this summer. 
1922 Oct. 1 
