li 



Professor Constantiu Wesmael, the distinguished author of 

 many memoirs, especially upon the Ichneumonidse of Belgium, 

 died on the 25th of October last, having been born at Brussels in 

 1798. One of my pleasant entomological recollections is that of 

 meeting him one day in Brussels starting off on one of his collecting 

 excursions, attended by a brace of gigantic St. Bernard dogs as a 

 defence against the wolves in the Belgian forest, to which he was 

 bound. 



Dr. Franz Xaver Fieber died on the 23rd of February last, at 

 the age of sixty-five. His attention was especially devoted to the 

 European Hemiptera, upon which order his elaborate work, ' Die 

 ouropaischen Hemiptera (Rhynchota Heteroptera),' 8vo, Wien, 

 1861, is one of the best treatises in existence. 



Coleman T. Bobinson, late President of the American Ento- 

 mological Society, who died at the age of thirty -four, was the joint 

 author, with Mr. Grote, of a series of excellent memoirs on the 

 Lepidoptera of the United States published in the ' Transactions' 

 of the Society, of which he was an exceedingly hberal supporter. 

 A list of his writings from the pen of Mr. Grote, appears in the 

 * Canadian Entomologist,' vol. iv.. No. 7. 



General Progress. 



The vast progress made in the Physical Sciences during the last 

 quarter of a century has had, as a necessary result, a great effect 

 in breaking down the old exclusive system of education in the 

 Universities, and more especially in the one to which I have the 

 honour to belong, in which Classics, Divinity and Mathematics 

 have until lately been almost the only subjects to which the more 

 serious attention of the students was directed, and to which 

 honours were attached. In the course of the year 1872 a Natural 

 Science School having, for the first time, been established in the 

 Universit)^ the Board of Studies of that school, after great 

 deliberation, issued a notice as to the range of subjects included 

 in the " Preliminary"* and " Final" Honour Examinations, in the 

 latter of which Zoology was introduced as a branch of Biology, 

 the general principles of which (including Comparative as well as 



* The Preliminary Honour Examination is compulsory upon all the candidates 

 in the Natural Science School, and is restricted to the more elementary parts of 

 Mechanics, Physics and Chemistry. 



