212 president's address. 



has paid some attention to the subject, and has been rewarded by- 

 obtaining from his own collection of shells, foreign as well as 

 British, between thirty and forty species, some of which are very 

 beautiful dendritic objects. They are much diversified in character, 

 and lie buried in the substratum of the shell, but may generally 

 be discovered by a pocket lens on holding the specimen up 

 against the light. Previous to examination by the microscope, 

 it is usually necessary to reduce the thickness of the matrix in 

 order to secure the requisite transparency. Mr. Hancock ob- 

 serves that all these parasites are not unicellular. He has 

 discovered one which is composed of numerous cells arranged 

 end to end, or, in other words, the tubular branches are divided 

 by septa like some of the Conjervae. 



Nothing new has been added to our local Molluscan fauna ; and 

 Mr. Mennell reports the deep-sea fishing to have been unusually 

 unj^roductive of our rare Dogger Bank shells. The Eev. A. 

 Merle Norman and others have, however, paid considerable 

 attention to this branch of Natural History, but their collecting 

 has been chiefly on other parts of the British coast. 



In Entomology Mr. T. J. Bold has been diligently collecting 

 Hemiptera and Homoptera during the past year: the results will 

 probably come before us at a future time. 



In the study of the Vertebrate forms of animal life, compara- 

 tively so few in numbers in our northern latitude, and too con- 

 spicuous to have escaped the observation of previous naturalists, 

 there is little for me to recal. In this branch of Natural History 

 it is rather in the study of habits, in anatomical investigation, 

 and in scientific classification, that we must anticipate the onward 

 march of knowledge. New and rare species occur, indeed, from 

 time to time, but rather as stragglers than as denizens ; and in 

 birds, especially, there is too much reason to fear that our local 

 catalogue is diminishing rather than increasing. I have, how- 

 ever, to remark on the occurrence of the orange-legged hobby 

 {Erytliropus vespertinus), near Morpeth, and of two instances of 

 the hobby [Hypotriorchis suhhuteo), in the north of Northumber- 

 land; its first occurrence, so far as I am aware, in that county. 

 On the 13th May, when visiting the Fern Islands, I picked up, 



