LIFE OF FLOWER 135 



College of Surgeons, it need not be further referred to 

 in this place, except that the writer may again take the 

 opportunity of expressing his regret that the views on 

 nomenclature there enunciated have not met with accept- 

 ance among the modern school of naturalists. 



At the " Jubilee " meeting of the Zoological Society, 

 held in June 1887, Flower, as President, read an address 

 on the " Progress of Zoological Science" during the 

 reign of Queen Victoria, which appeared in the Report 

 of the Council of that year, and to which reference has 

 been made in an earlier chapter. 



About this time the Natural History Museum received 

 a series of antlers shed year by year by one particular 

 red-deer stag, together with the complete skull and 

 antlers of the same animal ; and this gift induced Flower 

 to deliver in December 1887 a lecture on "Horns and 

 Antlers " before the Middlesex Natural History Society, 

 which is printed, with a plate of the aforesaid series of 

 red-deer antlers, in a somewhat abbreviated form, in the 

 Transactions of that Society. 



If we except a few on Cetacea, noticed in the next 

 chapter, Sir William's contributions to the Zoological 

 Society's Proceedings after 1883 were not numerous or 

 of much importance. In 1884 he contributed, however, 

 remarks on the so-called white elephant from Burma, 

 then exhibited in the Society's Menagerie ; and in the 

 same year he also wrote on the young dentition of the 

 capibara. In 1887 he discussed the generic position 

 and relationships of the pigmy hippopotamus of Liberia. 

 The acquisition in the following year by the Natural 

 History Museum of specimens of that breed of Japanese 

 fowls remarkable for the excessive elongation of the 



