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which it has been our privilege to listen. That you might not be de- 

 prived of your due, I have made request, almost at the last moment, of 

 our First Vice-president that he should, if possible, assume my duty. 

 Notwithstanding his all-engrossing official labors, he has most kindly 

 and considerately consented to relieve me fiom what would, at this 

 time, have been a burden which I did not dare to bear. 



My personal regret that I have been compelled to delegate duty to 

 another is tempered by the assurance that I feel that the Association 

 will have no cause to regret the substitution. 



ADDRESS OF FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT. 



By S. A. Forbes, Champaign, III. 



Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Association : When 

 the doubly unwelcome news came to me from Dr. Lintner that the state 

 of his health would not permit him to prepare the presidential address 

 of the year f<n" this Association, and that he therefore felt obliged to 

 request that I should perform this duty in his place, my time was al- 

 ready fully engaged up to and far beyond the present meeting. I have 

 consequently been able to make only a scanty provision for the emer- 

 gency, and shall have to claim your indulgence for presenting to you, 

 not a presidential address properly so called, but a brief and hurriedly 

 prepared substitute for one. 



For one thing, I have not been able to look the whole field of progress 

 over in our department of scientific work with the careful impartiality 

 which the preparation of such an address requires, and must si)eak to 

 you chiefly, therefore, of those features of the year's work which have 

 Tiappened to strike my attention most forcibly; and my treatment of 

 the matter will unavoidably have a one-sided character, due to personal 

 interest and i)ersonal bias. 



I shall make no further apology for mentioning first and foremost 

 the work of the year on the contagious diseases of insects. While 

 these cases of plant parasitism of insects are perhaps not as commonly 

 or as widely prevalent as those of insect parasitism, and while they are 

 more subject, as a rule, to differences of condition, and are conse- 

 quently less reliable in i)ractice, several of them have this great prac- 

 tical advantage : that the parasitic organisms can be bred and multi- 

 plied enormously without the use of the insect body as a medium. The 

 insect enemies of insects have been hitherto reared only on other in- 

 sects. We know of no artificial food for them by which they may be 

 made ready in advance, as a standing army by whose aid to suppress 

 sudden or overwhelming insurrection. I may say, in passing, that I 

 have hoped that some families of predaceous insects — the Coccinellidae 

 and a part of the Carabidie, for example — which feed under certain 

 circumstances upon vegetable food, might be reared as vegetarians, 

 and thus accumulated for use at will as carnivorous enemies of insect 



