OF FIELD CLUBS 163
should alternate as president, seems to me to be thoroughly
sound.
The activities of the local society have been and are varied.
The more obvious are its field work and indoor meetings. In the
London area field work ranges from visits to Kew, the Zoo and
the national museums to outdoor excursions somewhere within—
or even without—the society's boundaries, half day or day, or
sometimes more lengthy, excursions to areas of special interest
and in the Essex Field Club, among others, often including places
of historical interest. There have also been meetings more in the
style of nature rambles—as for instance the spring ramble in
Epping Forest, something of an annual institution in our own
club, as well as excursions of a specialist nature, like those to the
Walthamstow reservoirs and to the Essex coast for birds, and our
annual fungus and Cryptogamic forays. The pre-war fungus
foray was something of an event in London botanical circles :
most of us will remember the crowd which assembled in the
Forest ; if you were wise you turned up at the meeting place,
viewed the crowd to gauge how far afield you must roam to
escape it and then botanised in solitude or with a few like-
minded companions, appearing at High Beach in the late after-
noon to get your specimens named and to have tea. Our indoor
meetings have been as varied as the outdoor ones and by no means
restricted to natural history. Subjects of antiquarian interest
have often been prominent and I recall, even, a lecture on the life
and work of Faraday—and interesting it was too. Nor must I
forget the exhibits, which have, in my opinion, always been a
valuable feature of our club's indoor meetings : I think we should
encourage meetings devoted entirely to exhibits by members.
In the Essex Field Club, as in many similar societies, the
publication of a periodical has been an important activity. Such
periodicals should, I suppose, in the first place serve as a house
journal, a record of the club's activities, in fact the Proceedings
of the Society. Secondly, they should act as a medium for the
publication of papers and lectures of special interest : they should
also be the repository for records of animals and plants occurring
within the area covered by the club. Mention must also be made
of occasional special memoirs published by some societies, as for
example data on the East Anglian earthquake published by our
own Club.
Further, most clubs attempt to accumulate some sort of
library and sometimes a museum as well. Few can have been as
favourably situated as our own for the attainment of these ends.
Most clubs, and here the Essex Field Club has been well to
the fore, have included some specialists among their members,
and in the days when the accumulation of collections was popular,