8 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 



in Australia; and a Corresponding Member of the Society since 

 1888. Mr. Blackburn left England in the seventies, to take up 

 clerical work in the Hawaiian Islands. Being interested in ento- 

 mology, he made a very praiseworthy effort to accumulate a repre- 

 sentative collection of the insects of those islands. An account of 

 some of the groups of the Coleoptera, by Dr. D. Sharp, will be 

 found in the Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 

 for 1878, and later volumes; and of the Hemiptera, by Mr. A. 

 White, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 1878. 

 A few years later, Mr. Blackburn, came to Australia, and accepted 

 charge of a parish of Woodville, near Adelaide, where he spent 

 the rest of his life. Soon after his arrival, he took up the study of 

 Australian coleoptera, and became the author of a considerable 

 series of papers on the subject, comprising about thirty papers 

 contributed to the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Aus 

 tralia, the first of which was read in December, 1886, and was pub- 

 lished in Vol. x., 1886-87 (1887). The first of his papers contri- 

 buted to the Linnean Society of New South Wales, was one entitled 

 "Notes on the Hemiptera of the Hawaiian Islands" ( Proc. 1888, p. 

 343) ; and this was followed by a series of twenty-nine papers 

 descriptive of Australian coleoptera spread over the Proceedings 

 from 1888 to 1904. Mr. A. M. Lea, of Adelaide, has prepared 

 a more detailed biographical sketch than I am in a position to do, 

 together with a bibliography, and an index of the species de- 

 scribed by Mr. Blackburn, which will be most useful. This will 

 appear in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Aus- 

 tralia for 1912. 



Thirty-seven papers, covering the customary wide range of sub- 

 jects, were contributed at the Monthly Meetings. Parts i.-iii. of 

 the Proceedings for 1912, containing twenty of these, have been 

 published and distributed, while the concluding Part is now in 

 hand. Under existing conditions, which, are largely subject to the 

 prevailing unrest in industrial matters during a transitional period, 

 our printing does not proceed quite so rapidly as we have been 

 accustomed to ; but, so far, we have not been able to overcome the 

 difficulty. 



