PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



Natural History Museum, of which he was one of the Trustees. 

 I also greatly regret the loss of Canon Hankey, who joined 

 the Club in 1893, Miss Woodhouse in 1898, Mrs. A. H. Lock 

 in 1900, Sir C. E. H. Chadwyck Healey in 1905, and Colonel 

 Mead in 1914. Miss Woodhouse has been a very frequent 

 attendant at our Meetings, and we shall miss her presence, 

 especially at our Winter Meetings, in which she took great 

 interest. 



ZOOLOGY. 



The developments in the science of medicine of late years 

 have been to a great extent the developments of our know- 

 ledge of those very low forms of life which are responsible for 

 many of the diseases to which both man and animals are 

 subject. Some of these are visible through the microscope 

 and can be recognised in this way, while others, which 

 analog}* gives us every reason to believe are present, are 

 invisible under the strongest magnification that we can use. 

 About 30 of the latter kind are known, or rather suspected. 

 Where these protozoa are conveyed to the victim through the 

 bite of some insect in which they pass part of their existence, 

 the preventive method is either to stop the insect from biting 

 the patient, and so taking into itself the germs of the disease, 

 or to destroy the insects wholesale. And there are of 

 course, in many cases, preventive measures by inoculation with 

 the microbes in a modified and less virulent form. During the 

 late war these inoculations have been carried out to an extent 

 hitherto unknown, with, as a rule, excellent results, especially 

 in typhoid and tetanus. In influenza, the effect of inoculation 

 was most marked in regard to the pulmonary complications 

 which often follow an attack and the fatal cases, there being 

 only one-tenth of the former among the inoculated and about 

 one-twentieth of the deaths, whereas the improvement in the 

 actual disease amounted only to one-third. Parasitic amoebae, 

 present especially in dysentery, have lately been much studied 

 in this connection. These and similar discoveries are doubtless 



