XLI. 
own delicacy and reticence prevent us from knowing, except on our own conjecture and estimate, how 
astonishing and prodigious your liberality has been. I purposely omit on this occasion any particular 
reference to the similar services which you have rendered to other institutions, and hasten, as President of 
the Linnean Society of New South Wales, to offer you a faint and inadequate expression of the feelings 
which animate our whole body. ‘The Society entertains an ardent gratitude towards you—a gratitude 
which is not dulled, as gratitude may sometimes be dulled, by any affectation of beneficence, or any haughty 
or inconsiderate phrase or touch of manner in your acts of donation, but is, on the contrary, ever quickened 
by the freedom from vulgar ostentation and by the generous simplicity which specially characterise your 
behaviour towards the Society. You will, I hope—or rather, I am confident—accept these few words as 
an honest attempt to give some expression, however imperfect, to the sentiment dominant in every heart in 
this gathering of your friends and guests. In their name I thank you for your services as an active partner 
in their labours, as a wise legislator and officer in the management of their affairs, and a benefactor whose 
munificence would have made us feel a heavy burden of obligation, had it been attended with scantier 
courtesy, or with less emphatic kindness.” 
And just as during his lifetime he was a sagacious guardian of the Society’s 
welfare, never tendering his all important aid in such a way as to make others think 
that they had nothing to do but stand by and admire his liberality, his policy, on the 
contrary, being rather to offer supplementary help in the most unostentatious manner 
possible only after he had waited to see what the enterprise and resources of the 
members at large were capable of accomplishing, so in his latest benefactions Sir 
William Macleay’s intentions are evident enough. While on the one hand he wished 
to see the Society saved from the pinch of poverty which in the absence of any 
source of endowment is so calculated to sap the energy and hamper the usefulness of 
a Scientific Society, especially in a young country, or from being largely dependent for 
its usefulness on State patronage, so often apt to be paralysing in its tendency, he 
would not, even if it had been in his power, have endowed the Society with great 
wealth, recognising the stimulating necessity for individual effort, resulting in united 
effort, which alone would enable the Society both to maintain and promote its use- 
fulness, and in the efficacy of which he was so strong a believer. 
We may now revert for a moment to Sir William Macleay in the capacity of 
working naturalist to point out that the work begun so enthusiastically in 1862 was 
with few breaks steadily kept up until 1889, when failing health began to interrupt, 
and finally peremptorily put a stop to it. His work was necessarily of a pioneering 
and systematic character ; yet he was by no means a mere systematist whose sole 
idea was the multiplication of species, and nothing more. On the contrary, he clearly 
recognised the advantage accruing to a zoologist from residence in the country ; he 
was bent on overcoming, or at least mitigating, the almost prohibitive disabilities in 
respect of want of literature and of reference collections under which Australian 
workers in his day laboured, and to some extent still labour ; and he knew, too, that 
the systematist must precede the morphologist. The keynote to his work he himself 
gives in his first Presidential Address to the Linnean Society of New South Wales 
in 1876, when he says :— 
