156 Transactions of the Society. 



view being those dealing with medical and hygienic subjects in 

 general and with venereal diseases in particular. We hear of one 

 lecture upon Syphilis which was delivered at a camp near London, 

 with immediately beneficial results, to an audience of between 

 three and four hundred men. Lately Ogilvy has extended his 

 activities among the Hostels for Munition Boys at Woolwich and 

 elsewhere, and there is abundant resultant proof that these 

 Scourges of the Army to which I have referred flourish almost 

 entirely by reason of the ignorance of the men and boys with 

 regard to the nature of the dangers to which they are exposed. 



I have no hesitation in saying that even if no other Fellow of 

 the Society had devoted his time and his knowledge to War work, 

 the work of James Wilson Ogilvy is in itself a complete answer to 

 those critics who have expressed the opinion that the Eoyal Micro- 

 scopical Society " has not risen to the occasion." 



So much for the outcome of the first Meeting of the Society 

 during the War. Whilst that Meeting was in progress it is not 

 too much to say that the Nation was passing through perhaps the 

 most anxious moments that it has kuown since the War began. 

 There seemed no reason to suppose on the 21st October, 1914, that 

 the Germans would not reach Calais and occupy the northern 

 French Ports — so imminent indeed was the danger that the inspired 

 Press was telling us almost daily that these Ports were of no 

 strategic importance, and that their loss would be, from a military 

 point of view, a matter of no real moment. But a week later that 

 terrifying advance was checked — at a terrible cost indeed, but 

 checked definitely. By the end of the year, however, the War 

 " had been brought home to us." On the day of our Meeting in 

 December — the 16th — Hartlepool, Scarborough, and Whitby had 

 been bombarded by the German Fleet, with a casualty list of 127 

 killed and 567 wounded. The Air Kaids, with which we are now 

 familiar, almost to the regrettable verge of contempt, had begun, 

 tentative at first, but on the day before our January Meeting in 

 1915 — the 19th — we had our first Zeppelin Raid on the East coast, 

 and learned the opening words of a lesson destined later to be 

 bitterly driven home, that the inhabitants of these Lslands could 

 be murdered from the air with comparative immunity to the 

 murderers. Earlier in the month the world had been staggered by 

 the Ileport of the Commission upon the Atrocities committed by 

 the Germans in Belgium. On the day on which we met in 

 February 1915 the Submarine Policy of Germany was declared, 

 and we had experienced six months of a War which our optimists 

 had declared could not last more than six weeks. I have often 

 been reminded since then of a phrase of a modern novelist — 

 R. W. Chambers — who, in describing one of his characters, observed, 

 " He was a natural-born swindler, not only of other people, but of 

 himself — in other words, an optimist." 



