132 



As regards our own body, you have already heard read the Reports 

 from the Council and Auditors of the Treasurer's Accounts, relative 

 to our general concerns and financial position, upon which we are 

 fairly entitled to congratulate ourselves: there are, however, other 

 matters to which I must direct your attention. 



During the past year, our Bye Laws have undergone a searching 

 revision, in the course of which several modifications in the previously 

 existing Laws were made, with a view to the more efficient working 

 of the Society, and a new class of members, named Associates, limited 

 in number, and not subject to any pecuniary charge, has been intro- 

 duced, in order to endeavour to bring within the sphere of the Society 

 praiseworthy working entomologists, whose humble means have hither- 

 to kept them aloof from our meetings. I trust that this, and the other 

 alterations adopted by the Society, will be found to work beneficially. 



As regards our monthly meetings, we may justly congratulate our- 

 selves on the full attendance of our members, and on the great variety 

 of objects contributed by them towards the amusement and instruc- 

 tion of their fellow-members. Indeed, considering the comparatively 

 small number of our body, and the fact that our sittings are conti- 

 nued throughout the year, there are no scientific meetings in London 

 better attended or more satisfactorily kept up. By this means we 

 have been able to publish four quarterly parts of our ' Transactions,' 

 containing much interesting matter, to which I shall subsequently call 

 your more particular attention. I will therefore only add, in this 

 place, that as we are thus now enabled to publish papers read before 

 the Society, within a very short time after their perusal, it behoves 

 our members to give their memoirs to the Society for publication, ra- 

 ther than consign them to works of a more general nature : the same 

 cause will also operate in rendering unnecessary the loading of our 

 'Proceedings' with specific characters of new species, of which the full 

 descriptions will so shortly appear in full in the ' Transactions.' It 

 will also be observed that two papers are included in the parts of our 

 'Transactions' published during the past year, translated from the 

 ' Transactions ' of foreign Societies. The great interest of the subjects 

 of those two memoirs sufficiently warrants this step, rendered how- 

 ever to a certain extent necessary, by the comparative absence of the 

 usual amount of original memoirs laid before the Society during the 

 year by our own members. This circumstance, I hesitate not to say, 

 is attributable, in a great extent, to that great and all-absorbing fact 

 which would of itself render the past year one of the most marvellous 

 in the history of the world. 



