president's address. 



Charles W. De Vis, M.A., Curator of the Queensland Museum 

 for a number of years, died in Brisbane in April, 1915. Mr. De 

 Vis, though somewhat later in the field than his colleague, in his 

 official capacity, tried to do for the Queensland fauna, what Mr. 

 Bailey did for the floi-a, but under more unmanageable and diffi- 

 cult conditions; for the zoological species far outnumber the 

 botanical species, and the zoologist has no comprehensive, self- 

 contained monograph like the Flora Australiensis to serve as a 

 basis for his work. Both were pioneers in a local effort to pro- 

 vide, study, and record collections, illustrative of the fauna and 

 flora of the same State and for State purposes; and they both 

 encountered the usual preliminary difficulties, when such enter- 

 prises are in the early stages of development. Almost all Mr. 

 De Vis' numerous papers on the vertebrates, fossil or recent, of 

 Queensland and New Guinea, are to be found in the Proceedings 

 of this Society (forty, contributed during the years 1882-95), in 

 the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, in the 

 Annual Reports on British New Guinea, 1889-97, published in 

 Brisbane, or in the Annals of the Queensland Museum( 1892-1 91 1). 

 By the aid of the "List of Contributors t(j the first Series of the 

 Society's Proceedings" [21 titles listed; 19 others in Proceedings, 

 1886-1895]; of Dr. Shirley's "International Catalogue of Scien- 

 tific Literature: Queensland Volume"{1889) [18 titles under 

 Palaeontology; 49 under Zoology]; and of the recently published 

 "Index to Vols, i.-xxv. of the Proceedings of the Royal Society 

 of Queensland" (191 4), his numerous papers can be readily found. 

 For reasons mentioned, circumstances did not permit of his 

 issuing collected results, as his botanical colleague was able to do. 

 Mr. De Vis was elected a Corresponding Member of the Society 

 in July, 1882. He had retired from active work for some years 

 before his decease, on account of advancing age. It is remark- 

 able that Queensland should lose the two veterans, whos« work 

 was carried on concurrently for so many years, not only in the 

 same year, but within so short a time as a few weeks of each 

 other. From the absence of biographical details, this notice is 

 necessarily short. 



