inclusive, on which days the Fellows and their friends will 

 be admitted without any extra charge, and on which the 

 twenty free admissions will be available. 



2. Finances, 

 a. Income and Expenditure. 



The gradual decrease in the Income of the Society has 

 occupied the most anxious attention of the Council, and 

 they have to regret that the resignations and deaths have 

 again considerably outnumbered the accessions to the list 

 of Fellows, although in a far less proportion than the 

 average of the last five years. 



Convinced however as the Council are that the existence 

 of the Institution depends upon the efficient maintenance 

 of the Garden and Menagerie, they have not deemed it 

 necessary to make any further reductions in that depart- 

 ment, although they have carefully provided for the most 

 economical administration of the funds devoted to it. 



The actual deficiency of income in 1847, as compared 

 with the necessary expenditure of the establishment upon 

 its present footing, was £817 145. \d. 



The receipts at the gate were only £3239: 19s., a fact 

 which has rightly been attributed by the Auditors to the 

 combined effects of a late spring and the monetary pressure, 

 which affected the receipts of all public exhibitions for the 

 first six months of that year. The visitors of all classes 

 amounted to 93,546. It is clear, upon comparing these 

 amounts with the numbers of previous years, and still more 

 with the population-returns of the metropolis and the 

 country, that there can be no rational ground for despair- 

 ing that a reaction of popular feeling in favour of the intel- 

 lectual pleasures derivable from the Institution may again 

 place the finances in a condition which will enable the 

 Direction to extend its operations as largely as the import- 

 ance of the objects of the Society deserves, and as the avail- 

 able opportunities of communication with the most inter- 

 esting countries would suggest. 



It having come to the notice of the Council that the 

 means of obtaining access to the Gardens by persons not 

 meinbers of the Society were very imperfectly known. 



