74 MEETING, MONDAY, MAY 1. 



KEGULAR MEETING, MONDAY, MAY 1, 1882. 

 MEETING this evening at 7.30 o'clock. The President 

 in the chair. The records of the last meeting read. Do- 

 nations and correspondence announced. 



The letters from Mr. George E. Davenport, Corr. Sec'y 

 of the Middlesex Institute, tendering an invitation to 

 unite in a joint Field Meeting to be held at the Middlesex 

 Fells, and suggesting June 17 as the day of Meeting, 

 and from the Boxford Natural History Society, accept- 

 ing an invitation from the Institute to visit Salem, were 

 referred to the Field Meeting committee. 



The PRESIDENT referred to the previous meeting held by 

 the Institute in commemoration of this day, tracing back 

 the origin of its observance to remote antiquity and allu- 

 ding briefly to the views of the early settlers respecting 

 the festivities of its occurrence, to whom they were ex- 

 tremely distasteful ; soon after the landing of the Pil- 

 grims at Plymouth, events occurred in their neighborhood 

 which called forth an official denunciation by the colonial 

 authorities ; the celebration at Ma-re-mount, now Mount 

 Wollaston, Quincy, under the direction of Thomas Mor- 

 ton of Clifford's Inn in 1626 was cited as a familiar illus- 

 tration. Times have changed, and May day morning is 

 frequently observed to welcome the sun's return, the 

 bursting of the buds and the birth of the flowers. 



MR. JOHN H. SEARS read an interesting paper giv- 

 ing the date of the appearance of several of our spring 

 flowers ; also a list of those that have been noticed in bloom 

 the present season. The following is an abstract : 



