(| exxviii ) 
appreciate the honour of presiding over the Meetings of this 
Society. Per contra another of our ex-Presidents lately told 
me that he viewed it, and always had viewed it, not as a 
task but as an opportunity. For myself, I know only too 
well that I should be taking myself a great deal too seriously, 
if I allowed the possible consequences of anything that I may 
say to-night either to weigh upon my conscience overmuch, 
or to thrill me with exulting anticipations. So without 
preface I will announce as my “special subject ”’— 
THe TEREBRAE OF THE CHALASTOGASTRA, 
or, in plain English, The Saws (so called) of Sawflies. 
This is a matter of which it may be assumed that we all 
know something; for it would be difficult to name a text- 
book or popular work of any kind dealing with Entomology 
in general which does not figure the organ just mentioned 
and expatiate on its marvellous adaptation to the work in 
which it is employed. Summed up roughly, the general 
outline of the story comes to this—that there is a Group, or 
Genus, or Species (which to call it is usually left to the taste 
of the reader), at any rate there is an Insect among the 
Hymenoptera called a Sawfly, which lays its eggs in plants, 
and that, for this purpose, Nature has armed it with a 
marvellous tool, differing (as Réaumur says in an oft-quoted 
and highly rhetorical passage) from human saws only in its 
greater perfection, and in the material of which it is formed. 
This tool is described as, so to speak, the aird ré or absolute 
ideal of a saw—the Divine Original, of which the human saw 
is an inferior copy—a saw of which every tooth is denticulated, 
and thus becomes a saw itself. It is added (after a remark 
of Newport’s) that though never ceasing to be “a saw” it is 
also ‘“‘a lancet and a file.” With this instrument it saws 
“wood,” or “leaves,” or “ stems,” or “‘ branches,” etc. Weare 
not, as a rule, told anything as to the exact nature of the 
incisions made; whether they are simple holes, or broad 
excavations, or grooves, such as our saws make, and such as 
might be expected to be made by a “saw of saws.” Now 
and then, however, a writer says that the saw “both cuts 
and pierces,” or another that “it does not pierce (as a sting 
