THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 3 
or remonstrance, or by legal process—succeeded in preventing 
fearful waste and damage. By that time many important 
public meetings were held, in which the services of the 
Corporation were most gratefully and enthusiastically recog- 
nized, and at one of which they were denounced, in a letter 
by Mr. Ayrton, as intriguers,—a term he might as well have 
applied to the Good Samaritan, Their cause at length came 
on for hearing; and after twenty-two days of patient and 
unwearied attention, by the most learned Judge who presided 
in the Rolls Court, the judgment was delivered, with which 
the Common Council and the public were now familiar, 
giving the Corporation, in fact, all they ever asked, and 
preserving five thousand acres of the Forest for ever for the 
enjoyment of the people. That old Corporation of London 
had done many a good deed in the course of its long exist- 
ence, but he believed it never did a wiser, a more generous, 
or a more disinterested and patriotic act than when it resolved, 
at any cost, to preserve that beautiful Forest for the healthful 
enjoyment of the community at large for all time. 
The speech of Mr. Bedford was received with marked 
approbation ; and subsequently, on the afternoon of Saturday, 
the 28th of November, 1874, the Corporation of London, as 
represented chiefly by members of the Corn, Coal, and 
Finance Committee, celebrated—by a tour of the Forest, and 
a dinner at the Castle Hotel, Woodford—what Mr. Richard 
Cox, presiding at the dinner, declared to be “ one of the best 
and greatest victories ever achieved by the Corporation,’—to 
wit, the deliverance of Epping Forest from the encroachments 
of the lords of the manor. 
It will be observed that this event—I mean this triumphal 
visit to the recovered Forest—took place on the very day on 
which the last number of the ‘ Entomologist’ was issued, and 
that thus a notice of these proceedings was excluded from its 
pages. The proper time has now arrived for me to recur to 
the important fact that, when the subject of encroachment was | 
first under discussion, the members of the HAGGERSTON 
EnytomoLocicaL Society were the only entomologists in 
Britain who raised a finger, who entered the slightest 
protest, against the hateful enclosures then in progress. 
I regret to say the people generally did not then take, and 
have not since taken, the decided part they ought to have 
