PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. / 



Allowinci: for the distract iiiiir conditions under which the work it 

 records has been carried out, it may fairly be considered to be 

 an important addition to the Series, 



Eleven Ordinary Members were elected during the Session, 

 four resignations have been received, and one Corresponding 

 Member and one Ordinary Member have been lost by death. 

 IVIoreover, the names of eighteen Members, whose obligations 

 have remained undischarged for unduly long periods, will be 

 removed prior to the publication of a new issue of the List of 

 Members. The effective membership of the Society, therefore, 

 stands a little below the usual level. 



Edgar Albert Smith, I.S.O., F.L.S., F.Z.S., the Society's senior 

 Corresponding Member, was born in 1847, and entered the 

 service of the British Museum in his boyhood. At the age of 

 twenty, he was placed in charge of the conchological department, 

 and rose to be Senior Assistant Keeper in Zoology. His life- 

 woi'k lay in the naming and arranging of the vast collection of 

 more than forty thousand species under his charge. Though he 

 made no large generalisations or startling discoveries, by patient 

 industry he extended a knowledge of the Mollusca. His con- 

 tributions to scientific literature range from biief notes to 

 weighty monographs, and amount to nearly four hundred publi- 

 cations. A keen memory and long experience were ever at the 

 disposal of others at home or abroad, so that his help and kind- 

 ness are acknowledged by every conchological writer of the present 

 generation. Mr. Smith retired from the British Museum in 

 1913. He was elected a Corresponding Member in the early 

 days of the Society; and never failed to supply reprints of his 

 papers. He died on July 22nd, 1916, aged 68 years. 



J)v. J. H. May, a Member since 1901, died towards the end 

 of the year at Bundaberg, Queensland, where he had long 

 resided, and practised as a medical man. 



The death of Dr. Edward Pierson Ramsay, on 16th December, 

 1916, aged 74, well known in Sydney as Curator of the Aus- 

 tralian Museum from 1874-1895, removed another interesting 

 link with the past. He was a Foundation-Member of both the 



