Record. lxili 
REPORTS OF OFFICERS. 
PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
Fellow Members: 
The close of a year, in scientific as in business affairs, offers a 
convenient opportunity for retrospection and presents an obligation 
to look and plan forward. 
In the year just closed the Academy has been true to the broad 
purposes for which it came into being, and your officers have done 
what lay in their power to ease its passage consistently along these 
lines. 
The sixteen meetings provided for by the By-Laws and the long- 
standing practice of the Council have been held. At them have been 
discussed topics of general as well as technical interest in selected 
fields of scientific activity, presented in a manner at once attractive, 
instructive and stimulating. Though a regrettably small fraction of 
the total membership of the Academy is ever represented at any 
one meeting, the attendance (averaging 53) has compared favorably 
with that of preceding years and has shown a gratifying interest in 
the program offered. 
The Curators have devoted much time and pains to the little 
museum collection, in an effort to render it both interesting and educa- 
tional, and after several of the meetings the audience has adjourned 
in a body to the museum. 
The Librarian reports the customary increase in the library, 
chiefly through the Academy’s extensive exchange relations with the 
learned bodies of the world. Early in the year, as the result of 
consideration by the Council, a committee was appointed to consider 
Ways and means by which the library may be made more useful to 
our members and to the community as a whole, and the suggestions 
of this committee have been made the basis of administration. As in 
the preceding year the Academy has co-operated with other organiza- 
tions toward the preparation and issuance of a placing catalogue for 
the scientific publications that are represented in the libraries of 
Saint Louis, which it is hoped may be printed and thus made avail- 
able in the near future. No single step seems so likely to promote 
the ready use of scattered literature and incidentally to cause increased 
reference to the Academy’s library as this; and the policy of adminis- 
tration adopted by the special library committee of last year, and 
likely to be followed by the Council, is such as to give every possible 
facility for such reference. 
In the year just closed, four scientific papers have been published 
as numbers of the Academy’s Transactions; and with a concluding 
brochure, largely devoted to a record of proceedings for the years 
1908 and 1909, now in preparation by the Secretary, the eighteenth 
volume of Transactions will be completed. 
The material interests of the Academy have been exceptionally 
promoted through the activity of its members in the past year. 
The active membership, which stands for and furnishes means 
for carrying out the purposes for which the Academy exists, has 
experienced a net increase of 109 (or 40 per cent.), placing it today 
