32 PEOCEEDINGS OP THE 



Sir Josepli Hooker, in acknowledging the presentation, said : — 



" Mk. President, I cannot express my sense of the great, the 

 exceptionally great honour which your Council has conferred 

 upon me in the founding and awarding of this beautiful medal. 

 In receiving it, let me assure you that I value it as much for the 

 evidence it bears of the friendly regard of my associates as for 

 their all too high estimate of my endeavours towards the pro- 

 motion of science. Furthermore, let me say that from no 

 scientific body could it be received by me with more cordial wel- 

 come than from the Liunean Society, which was the first to which 

 I have the honour of belonging to enrol me amongst its Fellows, 

 and which especially cultivates those branches of knowledge to 

 which I have devoted the best years of my life. To these con- 

 siderations must be added what you yourself have alluded to, 

 namely, my hereditary interest in a Society of which my father 

 and grandfather were very early Fellows, and both of them con- 

 tributors to its 'Transactions.' To this latter circumstance it 

 may perhaps be due that I was elected at a very early age, being, 

 1 believe, the youngest member of our body, with no further 

 scientific claims on the support of my electors than that I was 

 serving as a naturali-^t in the Antarctic expedition under Captain 

 Eoss, where I happened to be the youngest, as I am now the only 

 surviving officer of those then under the command of tliat intrepid 

 navigator. I may mention that Captain Ross was himself a 

 Fellow, and had a copy of our ' Transactions ' in bis cabin, which 

 was a godsend to me. I was in the Falkland Isles when my 

 election took place, and nearly a year and a ha f elap.'ed before 

 my captain and I knew that we were fellow Liuneans. 



" In 184)2 the Lord Bishop of Norwich was Pre-ident. He was 

 the first of t n under whom I have been privileged to s^it. Had 

 the Society adopted the rule <>f biennial presidents I should have 

 sat under thirty at least, which, in my estimation, would have 

 detracted gieatly frum the dignity wliich 1 attach to the chair, 

 and I venture to think from its utility also. In the year 1842 

 there were 610 members of the Society (including fellows, foreign 

 members, and associates), with fully one-fourth of whom I soon 

 became personally acquainted. Twenty-eight years afterwards, 

 that is about midway between the former date and tiie present 

 time, the number of my personal friends in the Society had risen 

 to one-half of the whole body. Our numbers are now 820, but 

 the proportion of my personal friends among them ha-* inevitably 

 shrunk from my having outlived so many associate-! of my middle 

 age. And this leads me to ask your indulgence for one mure 

 egoti>tical detail. It is that I am perhaps the only Fellow who 

 personally knew four of t le 169 naturalists who, 110 years ago, 

 formed tlie luicleus of our Society. Of these fnur I knew two 

 during my later teens : they were the Eev. W. Kirby, the author, 

 with Spence, of the immortal 'Introduction to Entomology'; 

 and Dr. Heysham, of Carlisle; an excellent entomologist and 



