91 



THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 



Gentlemen, 



Owing to the absence of our excellent President, who, I am 

 sorry to say, is suffering in health, I have been asked to make a few- 

 observations this evening on the affairs of this Society and of Ento- 

 mology in general during the past year. 



It is scarcely necessary to inform the Members now present that 

 our Meetings have been well attended during the past year ; they 

 have been too well attended for the size of our room. However 

 pleasing it may be to us to see an increasing interest taken in the 

 Meetings of this Society, that pleasure is at present not unalloyed with 

 pain : head-ache, throbbing temples and the extreme discomfort caused 

 by breathing for some time a vitiated atmosphere, are the penalties to 

 which we are subject for the attractiveness of our favourite Science. 

 We number amongst our ranks many medical men, and I am sure all 

 will agree with me that the monthly crowding together of entomologists 

 in a space unfitted for their numbers must be deleterious. It might 

 be that were this state of things continued indefinitely, many of our 

 Members would succumb in this new struggle for existence, and those 

 entomologists best fitted to breathe our vitiated atmosphere would 

 have advantages over their fellows, and would become the favoured 

 race ; and supposing they transmitted these qualifications to their 

 descendants, it might happen, in the course of a ^c\v hundred years, 

 that a race oi entomologists would be produced who would positively 

 feel uncomfortable unless in rooms crowded to suffocation ; but whether 

 the probability of this consummation be great or not, I think it points 

 to a period too remote to be immediately applicable to the present 

 assembly. 



I am aware that there are difficulties in the way of moving a Society 

 which possesses a Library so extensive as ours : the expense of our 



