473 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
Homoplasmy or Convergent Development in Evolution. 
BY F. MUIR. 
(Presented at the meeting of December 6, 1923.) 
This meeting brings to an end the nineteenth year of our 
society, during which time we have held 216 meetings, thus only 
twelve meetings have been missed. This is a very good record 
for so small a society. The observations, captures, records, and 
descriptions, published in the twenty publications of nearly 2000 
pages issued by our society, rank next to the Fauna Hawaiiensis 
in importance as contributions towards the knowledge of our 
insect fauna, and in regards to habits, life histories, and food 
plants, they are the chief storehouse of our knowledge. If our 
society had not been in existence during these nineteen years, 
few of these observations would have been placed on permanent 
record, and the loss to our science would have been great. The 
complete indices made for each of the four volumes so far 
completed have made the miscellaneous information scattered 
through our Proceedings easily accessible to future workers. 
Our small membership makes it impossible for us to publish our 
Proceedings upon the subscriptions and sales of our Proceed- 
ings, and the trustees of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Associa- 
tion have come to our assistance in a very generous manner. 
We all fully appreciate this help and trust that the good cause 
that they assist eventually comes back to them through the 
economic work which is made more possible with every increase 
in our knowledge of the fauna of the Islands. In no other 
group of tropical islands is the insect fauna so well known, the 
endemic insects so distinctly recognized from the later introduc- 
tions, or the records of the later natural and artificial insect 
immigrants so fully observed and recorded, and in no other such 
group of islands has such knowledge been used to better advan- 
tage in the control of such insects as affect our economic plants. 
To those of us who have been carrying on economic work 
along the lines of biological control, the following extract from 
a letter of the great French naturalist, Philibert Commerson, 

Proc. Haw. Ent. Soec., V, No. 3, December, 1924. 
