PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 491 
A very few years ago the ship employed by the company which is 
exploiting the phosphates of Christmas Island introduced the brown rat 
(M. decumanus) there. Within a short time the two indigenous rats first 
collected by Mr. C. Andrews, of the British Museum, named Mus macleart 
and Mus novitatis, were wiped out of existence. The same animal having 
been introduced in North America, is gradually spreading, and as it 
spreads the native fauna of Muridae is slowly vanishing. 
To adorn our ladies’ heads some of the most beautiful of birds are being 
systematically exterminated. In the London market alone were sold last 
year some 50,000 sooty terns (Sterna fuliginosa, S. anwstheta, and S. 
bonata), 20,000 specimens of the crowned pigeon (Goura) from New 
Guinea, their sole habitat, immense numbers of ‘osprey’ feathers, egret 
and heron, and over 50,000 birds of paradise, or more than double the 
number of the year before. 
I have no time to continue this melancholy record, but it could be 
prolonged almost indefinitely. 
When we reflect how greatly we treasure every scrap of knowledge we 
can glean about such recently extinct animals as the Rhytina—Steller’s 
sea-cow—the dodo, the great auk, we must see that if it be impossible to 
check the gradual disappearance of those animals doomed to extinction, we 
should at least monograph them and take every care that what can be per- 
manently kept of their structure should be kept. In respect to the record- 
ing of the habits and physical features of a disappearing race, the 
anthropologists are setting an example which the zoologists would do well 
to follow. 
We are living with a disappearing fauna around us, and numerous as 
the museums of the world are, and skilled and painstaking as the curators 
of these museums are, they are both wholly inadequate to deal with the 
material at hand. Some dozen years ago Dr. Gimther made a very careful 
estimate of the number of species of animals which were known in the 
years 1830 and 1881. I summarise his table :— 
Number of Species known in the years 1830 and 1881. 
~ 1830. 1881, 
Mammalia ; ‘ ‘ 1,200 2,300 
Aves : : : 3,600 11,000 
Reptilia and Batrachia : 543 3,400 
Pisces . 7 = 3,500 11,000 
Mollusca F ‘ A 11,000 33,000 
Bryozoa . : : (40) 120 
Crustacea (year 1840) . : (1,290) 7,500 
Arachnida F 5 és 1,408 8,070 
Myriapoda : : : 450 1,300 
Insecta : : : 49,100 220,150 
Echinodermata (1838) 3 (230) 1,843 
Vermes (1838) : (372) 6,070 
Coelenterata (1834) . : 500 2,200 
Porifera (1835). : . (50) say 400 
Protozoa (1838-44) say j (305) },, 3,300 
73,588 311,653 
— C—O 
Taking an average year between 1881 and the present date, but rather 
nearer the latter, because each year the number of newly described species 
becomes larger, Dr. Sharp tells me that according to the zoological record 
12,449—let us call it 12,450—new species were described in the year 1897. 
