THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 3 



or remonstrance, or by legal process — succeeded in preventing 

 fearful waste and damage. By that time many important 

 public meetings were held, in which the services of the 

 Corporation were most gratefully and enthusiastically recog- 

 nized, and at one of which they were denounced, in a letter 

 by Mr. Ayrton, as intriguers, — a term he might as well have 

 applied to the Good Samaritan. Their cause at length came 

 on for hearing; and after twenty-two days of patient and 

 unwearied attention, by the most learned Judge who presided 

 in the Rolls Court, the judgment was delivered, with which 

 the Common Council and the public were now familiar, 

 giving the Corporation, in fact, all they ever asked, and 

 preserving five thousand acres of the Forest for ever for the 

 enjoyment of the people. That old Corporation of London 

 had done many a good deed in the course of its long exist- 

 ence, but he believed it never did a wiser, a more generous, 

 or a more disinterested and patriotic act than when it resolved, 

 at any cost, to preserve that beautiful Forest for the healthful 

 enjoyment of the community at large for all time. 



The speech of Mr. Bedford was received with marked 

 approbation ; and subsequently, on the afternoon of Saturday, 

 the 28th of November, 1874, the Corporation of London, as 

 represented chiefly by members of the Corn, Coal, and 

 Finance Committee, celebrated — by a tour of the Forest, and 

 a dinner at the Castle Hotel, Woodford — what Mr. Richard 

 Cox, presiding at the dinner, declared to be "one of the best 

 and greatest victories ever achieved by the Corporation," — to 

 wit, the deliverance of Epping Forest from the encroachments 

 of the lords of the manor. 



It will be observed that this event — I mean this triumphal 

 visit to the recovered Forest — took place on the very day on 

 which the last number of the ' Entomologist' was issued, and 

 that thus a notice of these proceedings was excluded from its 

 pages. The proper time has now arrived for me to recur to 

 the important fact that, when the subject of encroachment was 

 first under discussion, the members of the Haggerston 

 Entomological Society were the only entomologists in 

 Britain who raised a finger, who entered the slightest 

 protest, against the hateful enclosures then in progress. 



I regret to say the people generally did not then take, and 

 have not since taken, the decided part they ought to have 



