THE annual general meeting of the Association, which closes the history of one year of its progress, and turns the leaf of a new page, is always marked by the records of the successive annual meetings of its various Branches, each of which has its own local autonomous existence, its own form of activity, its individual life, and its own annals; so that, as our pages to-day bear witness, through the agency of the Branches, the Association has an active decentralised series of forces, which

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... se a vital influence, each in its own locality. By a happy elasticity, each Branch, while it receives and imparts additional power through its representative relation to the whole Association, maintains an existence fully individualised, and developing itself freely according to the exigencies and characters of the locality. In some districts, as in the south-eastern counties, where a Branch occupies a country marked by many scattered centres of population, it subdivides itself into a well conceived series of districts or subbranches, each with its own officers, and bearing a somewhat similar relation to the Branch