KXV. 
Parts 1-3 of Scott’s “Australian Lepidoptera and their Transformations” were 
published in London in 1864. Early in the decade too Professor McCoy in 
Victoria, and Mr. G. F. Angas of South Australia, began to publish important 
zoological papers. 
From the date mentioned until the present day, in which Australian workers in 
proportion to their number have begun to undertake a fair share of the work to be 
done, the advance has been, with little interruption on the whole, steady and marked. 
Not only have the older Australian Scientific Societies outgrown their early troubles, 
but Scientific Societies generally have multiplied, and in most of the Colonies such 
as have asked for it are now in receipt of aid in some shape from the State on a more 
or less liberal scale, though subject to the periodically recurring exigencies of 
retrenchment, and not therefore of an absolutely permanent character. The three 
Australian Universities now include in their curricula the teaching of biology on 
modern lines. Government Scientific Institutions, such as, for example, the Aus- 
tralian Museum and the Department of Mines of New South Wales, by increased 
endowments—also subject to reduction in times of retrenchment—have been able to 
extend their purely scientific operations ; while the successful inauguration of new 
Departments, such as that of Agriculture, with its scientific staff, are all contributing 
to the general advancement. And lastly, the scientific federation of the Australasian 
colonies in and through the recently established Australasian Association for the 
Advancement of Science fitly rounds off and completes the cycle of scientific agencies 
now at work in Australasia. All that can reasonably be desired in the way of 
organisation is now forthcoming. The pressing need of the time is an increase in the 
number of workers sufficient both to supply the places of the veterans who in the 
ordinary course of nature are ceasing from their labours and yet to provide a 
progressive increase in the total number. 
Finally, as the net result of all the agencies hitherto at work, in the year 1893 to 
the Australian Fauna generally may perhaps be fairly applied the words of Dr. P. L. 
Sclater in his Presidential Address to the Biological Section of the British Associa- 
tion in 1875—words on that occasion restricted to the Vertebrata alone—who said : 
“That we know more of the fauna of Australia than of other English colonies im 
different parts of the world is certain.” 
Nor is it too much to say that no local efforts have contributed more to this 
general advancement of Australian zoological knowledge than the work accomplished, 
without aid from the State, by the Entomological and Linnean Societies of New 
South Wales, of each of which Sir William Macleay was at once the moving and 
the sustaining spirit. And as the Societies mentioned were largely the instruments 
in and through which he, at the same time sinking his individuality, elected chiefly 
d ; 

