ag) REPORT-—1899. 
First Conference, Dover, September 14, 1899. 
The Corresponding Societies Committee were represented by Rev. 
T. R. R. Stebbing (Chairman), Rev. J. O. Bevan, Mr. G. J. Symons, 
Professor W. W. Watts, and Mr. T. V. Holmes (Secretary). 
The Report of the Corresponding Societies Committee (see p. 27), a 
copy of which was in the hands of every delegate present, was taken as read. 
After briefly calling attention to the forms for recording observations 
of coast changes, a result of the discussion on Coast Erosion at the Bristol 
Conference, the Chairman delivered the following Address : 
The Living Subterranean Fauna of Great Britain and Ireland. 
It would have been easy to enlarge the subject of this address and 
extend its interest by omission of the word ‘living,’ and joining the flora 
to thefauna. All the province of the paleontologist would thus have been 
included, and we should have been free to discuss the distribution of truffles 
and pignuts. But better results may be hoped for from a more restricted 
ambition. The cave-bear must be passed over witha fond regret. Weare 
concerned only with animals still living. If among vertebrates we have to 
content ourselves with birds and bats and rats, with badgers and foxes and 
rabbits and moles, and in general a group of creatures not prominent for 
size or ferocity, there are compensations which none but a very ardent 
sportsman will despise. Our country is too much overrun by that digging, 
delving, and destructive species, homo sapiens, to allow us any hope of 
turning upa Veomylodon (or Gilossotheriwm), or even a mudfish. The 
animals above-mentioned are of course only in a modified sense subter- 
ranean. They seek their shelters or make them in caves or holes of the 
earth, but are still both free and forced to come abroad for various pur- 
poses into the light of day or beneath the nocturnal sky. 
Like so many other terms applied to natural knowledge, the word 
‘subterranean’ is highly indefinite. How much earth must I put on my 
head, and how long must I keep it there to make me truly a Troglodyte ? 
There is the giant Enceladus, whose uneasy turnings cause, as you know, 
the eruptions of Mount Etna, under which he is permanently imprisoned. 
From him, then, the conception of an underground animal may vary to 
Virgil’s angry bees lulled for a few moments by the sprinkling of a hand- 
ful of dust. Under loose stones a crowd of creatures take refuge, frame 
their dwellings, lay snares, and in various ways make themselves at home. 
Among these are vipers and lizards, ants and bees and beetles, centipedes, 
spiders, and woodlice, with slugs and other slimy and seductive specimens 
to suit almost every imaginable taste. Of burrowing spiders, none in Great 
Britain has yet been found making a door to its trap. Whether the dis- 
credit attaches to the British spider’s want of ingenuity or to the British 
arachnologist’s want of research is still an open question. As to the dis- 
tribution of the mole cricket, of the bee that burrows in footpaths, and 
the history of mining insects in general within our islands, there may still 
be information worth gleaning. The soils they favour, the temperatures 
they can endure, their modes of working, their means of subsistence, the 
good and the evil they do to mankind are among the obvious points of 
interest connected with them. One has, however, to remember that 
entomology is a science with innumerable students, a boundless literature, 
and an infinite subject. There is, therefore, always a risk that in suing for 
