In these days it is the habit of Prime Ministers and Presidents to lie abroad for the good of their country, and I can only hope that your own President's unconscionable absences during the past year may shelter under that umbrella. In Southern Rhodesia, at Zimbabwe, he looked upon the rugged best that trans-Saharan Africa can produce and was shown incidentally, with a proper reverence, the crumbling cavity where one of our Vice-Presidents ‘directed her first solo-excavation’. In Pakistan he was invited by the Government to conduct an expedition in the North-West Frontier, and has pleasure in recalling the open-handed collaboration, not only of the Pakistan Department of Archaeology, but also of the highly efficient Pakistan Air Force. In India he saw his old colleagues and pupils at work on a scale unapproached by any other country in the world at the present time, unless it be rivalled by the hidden prowess of the U.S.S.R. Only the untidy seas of the African coast barred him at the last stage from Cyrene, where he would have found our Fellow Mr. Richard Goodchild still the accepted master of free Cyrenaica's archaeological enterprises, a position which reflects alike his knowledge and his understanding. And in all these far-flung missions your President was conscious, and many of his hosts were conscious, that he bore with him the hallowed lamp of Burlington House. It is not a bad thing that a Society so universal in its concern, whether in time or space, as ours traditionally is should do a little travelling in an age when the poet can no longer complain that there ain' no 'buses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay. To our wider work and opportunity in partibus I shall turn again in a few minutes.