Agricultural Societies in British Guiana. 
AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
By Thomas Watt, Editor of the Royal Gazette, Georgetown, Demerara. 
AM not aware of the existence of any col- 
lection, or indeed that any attempt at collection 
has ever been made, of the records of the Agri- 
cultural Societies of British Guiana. Some years ago, 
in England, I was called upon to undertake the com- 
pilation of a history of a Literary and Philosophical 
Society, and the task proved a comparatively easy one, 
inasmuch as printed copies of the minutes and pro- 
ceedings were fortunately extant from the outset of its 
career. Had similar facilities been at hand here, I doubt 
not that we should ere now have been able to boast of a 
fairly complete and authentic account of the doings of 
the Agricultural Societies which preceded the Institution 
under whose auspices Timehri'is published. But such ready 
material is not accessible here to the would-be compiler. 
Few, indeed, even of our institutions of the present day 
that can lay claim to an existence for any length of time, 
are in a position to produce original archives of the past. 
Hence it is that in seeking to bring together in some- 
thing like connected and consecutive shape the records 
of many of them recourse must perforce be had to 
those "brief and abstract chronicles" — the newspapers, 
and to the fa6t that the data thus available, in the case 
ef our Agricultural Societies, is scattered over newspaper 
