Noy. 1906.] THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 211 
JOHN SIBBALD had been a Fellow of the Society since 1851, 
the year after his enrolment as a first year medical student 
in the University botany class. Studies did not press so 
hardly on the medical student in those days as they do now, 
and Sibbald, like others of his year, found time for botanical re- 
search, and he investigated the life of Volvoz, and an account 
of this work was communicated to the Society and after- 
wards published. The claims of Psychiatry, a subject he 
made his own, absorbed him after graduation, and he became 
successively Deputy Commissioner and Commissioner of 
Lunacy in Scotland, in which position he received the honour 
of knighthood. He retired from active work in 1899, and 
died in April of this year (1905). Sagacious, broad minded, 
humorous, Sir John Sibbald was of the best type of medical 
man produced by our Scottish system of medical education. 
FEDERICO DELIPNO was an example of a man forced by 
overwhelming love of plants to sacrifice a civil career in 
order to devote himself to botany. Born near Genoa in 
1833 he studied at the University there, and then entered 
the service of the State, rising to a prominent official posi- 
tion. Devoting himself, however, to botany, he in 1871 
became Professor of Natural History at the Forest School 
of Vallambrosa, investigated the botany of Brazil as a 
member of the expedition sent out from Italy in i874 on 
the frigate “Garibaldi.” Thereafter he was successively 
Professor of Botany at Genoa and Naples. Delpino was a 
prolific writer. Three subjects interested him specially. 
Flower-pollination, in which his earlier work was done. 
He was one of the first to endeavour to group the known 
phenomena of flower-pollination in a definite biological 
system, and his results still hold the field. In phyllotaxy, 
another of his subjects, he contributed a large number of 
new facts to our stock of knowledge. His later work dealt 
with myrmecophily, to which he was doubtless drawn by the 
discoveries in Borneo of his compatriot Beceari, and he made 
known many interesting features of this curious form of 
symbiosis. Delpino was elected Corresponding Member of 
the Society in 1873 and Foreign Honorary Fellow in 1885. 
Leo ERRERA, who at the time of his death in August last 
