I thank you most heartily and sincerely for the very high honour you have conferred upon me in electing me as your President for the ensuing year. I confess that I feel myself very undeserving of this distinction, and very unequal, I fear, to discharge the duties attached to the office in a manner becoming its dignity and importance. The head and front of my ill desert has been my irregular attendance, or rather my regular absence from the meetings of the Association; and it was, therefore, with feelings of surprise, as well as gratification, that I heard of my election at your last annual meeting, where, as usual, I was absent. That I should have been elected in those circumstances, I cannot but regard simply as a compliment to Scotland, and to its metropolitan asylum, of which I have the fortune to be the chief. I thank you, therefore, most cordially, not only for myself, but for old Scotland and its modern Athens, as some of your poets have called her, or rather, I should say, for the town which we ourselves call by the more endearing name of Auld Reekie.