The President's Address. By E. M. Nelson. 157 



papers offered by this Society : — first, prompt publication ; secondly, 

 large circulation. 



Mr. C. F. Rousselet has again kindly consented to act as your 

 Curator, and the catalogue of instruments and apparatus is in course 

 of formation. 



Mr. Parsons' assistance has been of great value to your staff in 

 carrying on the work of the Society. 



The special thanks of the Society are due to Messrs. Baker, Beck, 

 and Watson for so freely lending us instruments on those occasions 

 when the exhibition required more Microscopes than we could supply. 



The block in the shelves in our Library is being actively dealt 

 with by your Council, and we hope shortly to have all the literature 

 that is quite foreign to our own work disposed of. 



Death has removed from us two well known and eminent micro- 

 scopists who were Honorary Fellows of this Society, viz. Dr. Wallich 

 and Count Castracane, of whom obituary notices have already appeared 

 in the Journal. 



It is with feelings of deep regret that I now allude to the great 

 loss this Society sustained, only a little more than a fortnight ago, by 

 the death of Mr. W. T. Suffolk, its Treasurer. His decease came upon 

 us as a sudden shock, for he was, as you will all remember, with us at 

 our last meeting on the 20th of December, and twelve days after that 

 he died. His loss will not only be felt by this Society and by other 

 kindred Societies with which he was connected, but he will also be 

 greatly missed by a large number of personal friends throughout the 

 entire microscopical world in this country. He was elected a Fellow 

 of this Society thirty-six years ago, and he joined the Quekett Micro- 

 scopical Club a month after it was inaugurated. In the second Annual 

 Report of that Club (1867) we read that, " The Committee feel they 

 would be ill-discharging their duty were they to omit to express to 

 Mr. Suffolk the warmest thanks of the Club for his continued efforts 

 to promote its usefulness." This passage adequately expresses the 

 debt due him from the Quekett Club, and from this Society, for 

 his labours during the whole time of his connection with them. 



During the past eight years he has been our Treasurer ; but his 

 greatest work was the preservation, arrangement, cataloguing, and 

 indexing the slides in our Cabinet, which number about 7700. 

 Many of the specimens were, as you know, perishing from leakages 

 and imperfect cementing ; these, numbering some hundreds, he re- 

 mounted, and in addition to this, he wrote a manuscript catalogue, 

 and prepared a card index of the whole of them. It would be difficult 

 to estimate the amount of work and time Mr. Suffolk so generously 

 gave to the Society in addition to that entailed by his office as 

 Treasurer. 



Your Council has been able to meet a long-felt want in the 

 microscopical world by standardising the substage and eye-pieces of 

 Microscopes. In this matter the trade came forward and rendered 



