With these great natural advantages, and with the great love for natural science, which is inherent in Norfolk 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; {88} 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; when 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 recognise 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. VIII. THE PARISH OF ST. GILES’S, NORWICH, AND ITS CHURCH. {90a} The parish of St. Giles’s, though relatively not large, yet has always in later periods occupied an important position in the City of Norwich. It formerly—as is usual with parishes dedicated to Saint Giles—lay upon the outskirts of the city, though not _necessarily_ within the city proper previously to 1253 {90b} (as Mr. Hudson has pointed out), when the city was enclosed with a fosse. In recent times Norwich has expanded largely in the direction of Earlham and Heigham, and St. Giles’s is now completely overlapped by these populous suburbs.