202 Address delivered at the sixth and last 
I shall have ceased to address you, our club will have ceased 
to exist. 
These, however, are but the natural feelings to which we 
cannot avoid giving utterance, when submitting to any sacri- 
fice which our better judgment pronounces to “be expedient. 
The present sacrifice is on our part voluntary. We submit 
to it, or rather I should say we embrace it, because we con- 
ceive that we have attained the great object of our institution ; 
and, that object once attained, there remains no further neces- 
sity for keeping in force the means which have achieved it. I 
need scarcely remind the friends who surround me, that this 
club was established at a period when zoology still languished 
under the unmerited neglect to which it had almost at all 
times been exposed in aie country, and when a few disinte- 
rested votaries only of the science were found chivalrous 
enough to devote themselves to an unpopular and an unpro- 
fitable pursuit. The period, however, was auspicious in 
promise. A new impulse had begun to operate in every 
department of science. Whether it owed its origin to the 
change of events which allowed the minds of our countrymen 
to subside from the bustle of war and politics into the calmer 
arts of peace, — or whether to the increased intercourse with 
our Continental neighbours, and the consequent example set 
us by a people who at no time suffered even the more gene- 
rally engrossing ayocations of the field or the cabinet to 
supersede the interests of science, — whatever, in short, may 
have been the cause, certain it is that a spirit of enquiry had 
gone forth, which required only encouragement and proper 
direction to be rendered eminently beneficial in its effects. 
With a view to these signs of the times, the few leading zoolo- 
gists of whom we could at that time boast, united themselves 
into this club; hoping by this union to impart a wider in- 
fluence to their own exertions, to stimulate others to partici- 
pate in their labours, and, above all, to direct a portion of 
that energetic spirit of enquiry, w ten they every where saw 
around them, into the cultivation of their own favourite science. 
How far they have succeeded in their object, the history of 
zoology in this country, during the last six years, will full 
evince. Even within their own limited circle, and with their 
contracted means, they effected much, as I shall have occa- 
sion to point out hereafter. But it was in the impulse origi- 
nally given by their exertions to the propagation of the 
science, more particularly by laying the foundation of the 
Zoologic al Society, that powerful association, which, with un- 
limited resources, carried their principles and their objects 
into execution, that their agency is to be traced. Under 
