338 Proceedings . 



with the Director of the Dominion Museum in making a preliminary census 

 of matters connected with scientific and industrial research. It was resolved 

 that the following be the Committee, with the power to add to their number : 

 Dr. Cockayne, Messrs. Hogben, Aston, Kirk, and Parry. It was resolved to 

 leave the arrangements for carrying on propaganda in connection with 

 science and industry to the same Committee. 



Confirmation of Minutes. — It was left to the Publication Committee, on 

 Friday, the 1st February, 1918, to confirm the minutes of the annual 

 meeting and to decide whether it was desirable to publish Appendices A, B, 

 and C to the annual report. 



ADDRESS OF 1HE PRESIDENT. 



The following is the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting 

 of the Board of Governors of the New Zealand Institute, at Wellington, on 

 the 29th January, 1918, by Professor W. B. Benham, F.R.S. :— 



Gentlemen, — My thanks are due to you for doing me the honour of re-electing me 

 to the Presidency of the Institute for a second year — a year that has been marked 

 by the great activity of the Standing Committee in relation to the important work of 

 endeavouring to draw up a scheme for the correlation of science and industry, to which 

 I will refer later. 



Too little attention, 1 think, has been paid in past times to those of our own men 

 of science who have passed away. Recently my attention was called to the fact that 

 no memoir, no obituary notice even, is to be found in our Transactions of some who 

 have done good service, especially to natural science, in New Zealand. Thus the work 

 of Colenso and of Parker, to mention but two, is not recorded in our volumes. I think 

 this should be rectified in the future, and that one of our officers, or some one else, should, 

 while it is yet time, get together the salient facts of the life-history of those who are 

 at present working, so that their contributions to the progress of science in New Zea- 

 land may receive due recognition. 



It would be a very laborious task to write a history of the gradual building-up of 

 science in New Zealand at the present time, and I am glad to see that Mr. G. M. 

 Thomson is at present engaged in writing a series of articles on our naturalists in the 

 Olago Witness. These will form a very valuable contribution to our history. It is, I 

 think, a wise thing to recall to our minds from time to time the gradual steps by which 

 each of our sciences has been built up, and the names of the men who have thus helped 

 us : we are too much interested in the present-day problems to consider their history, 

 and yet much of our present work is merely adding a brick or two to the edifice whose 

 foundations have been laid in the past. Let us not think too greatly of the importance 

 of that single brick, but rather think humbly of our own small contributions. 



I had intended to refer to some of the distinguished men of science who have passed 

 away during the year, but 1 find my address already too long. Two of our honorary 

 members are included in this list, while Lydekker, who died in 1916, should have been 

 referred to in my last address. 



The Rev. Octavius Pkkard-Cambridge, F.R.S. , who was for fifty years vicar of 

 Bloxworth, in Dorset, died in March, 1917, at the age of eighty-eight, and was one of 

 the world's authorities on trap-door spiders, on which he contributed two papers to 

 our Transactions describing some of our native species. Few naturalists of equal 

 calibre are less revealed by their published work. He was a systematist, a describer 

 and identifier of species, and though in this line of work no particularly brilliant dis- 

 coveries are associated with his name, it is work requiring rather special gifts of careful 

 observation, an absolutely necessary work on which biologists can build. 



George Massee, F.L.S., was aged sixty-seven when he died, in 1917. For twenty 

 years he was head of the Crypytogamic Department at Kew, where he specialized on 

 fungi. He published several systematic works on the group, and later turned his atten- 

 tion to those which produce disease in plants, on which he published several descriptive 

 works, useful alike to the botanist and the agriculturist. He contributed two papers 

 to our Transactions on the fungus flora of New Zealand. He combined the skill of the 

 artisl with the accuracy of observation of the scientist, many of his drawings which 

 illustrate his work's being of great beauty. 



