IINNEAN SOCIETr OF LONDON. 



PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



The year during -which I have had the high honour to hold the 

 responsible office of President of this Society will be ever memor- 

 able in our annals by its association with the great loss which we, 

 in common with the whole British nation, have sustained in the 

 death of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, who was our 

 Patron throughout the whole of her long and glorious reign. It 

 will be within the recollection of Fellows that, in conuection with 

 this sad event, we voted an address of condolence, as also of con- 

 gratulation upon his Accession, to His Majesty King Edward VII., 

 who has long been one of our Honorary Members. Not only was 

 our address favourably received and graciously acknowledged, but, 

 as I have already had the great satisfaction of formally announcing 

 to you. His Majesty, following the example of His Royal Prede- 

 cessors, has been pleased to signally honour us by assuming the 

 vacant office of Patron of this Society. 



We have also had to deplore the serious illness which last autumn 

 prostrated our other Honorary Member, His Majesty Oscar II., 

 King of Sweden and Norway. It is a matter of sincere congratu- 

 lation that His Majesty should have so completely recovered as to 

 be able to resume the reins of government which he has held so 

 long and so wisely. 



You have heard from the Senior Secretary of the ebb and flow 

 which has taken place in the general constitution of the Society. 

 Among those Avhose loss by death we deeply regret, I cannot 

 forbear to specially mention Dr. John Anderson, formerly Super- 

 intendent of the Indian Museum, Calcutta, who projected the great 

 work on the Zoology of Egypt, of which one volume has already 

 appeared and the remaining two are in active preparation; and 

 Mr. Walter Percy Sladen, who served the Society faithfully and 

 well for ten years (1885-95) as its Zoological Secretary, and who, 

 had he lived, would have done much more for the Society, whose 

 interests he always had at heart, as also for the science in which 

 he had already earned a well-deserved reputation. Our list of 

 Foreign Members is the poorer by the disappearance of two dis- 

 tinguished names : those of Jacob Georg Agardh, Professor of 

 Botany in the University of Lund, who, like his eminent father, 

 C. A. Agardh (also a Foreign Member in his day), was not only 

 one of the foremost algologists of his time, but a great botanist as 

 well ; and of Christian Frederik LUtken, the well-known Professor 

 of Zoology, and Director of the Museum, in Copenhagen. We have, 

 on the other hand, filled up the number of our Foreign Members 

 by the election of Prof. Ignatz Urban, a prominent member of the 

 statf of the Royal Herbarium, Berlin ; of M. Francois Crepiu, the 

 distinguished Director of the Royal Botanic Garden, Brussels ; of 

 Prof. Kjellman of Upsala, an algologist like Agardh his fellow- 

 countryman whom we have lost ; and of Prof, A. S. Packard, of 



