Spring: iWmino:, 1554. 



THE PEESIDENT'S ADDEESS. 



However unfitted I may feel to fill this highly honourable 

 chair, I can assure you that this feeling of unsuitability does not 

 detract one iota from my thanks to you for having selected me. 

 It makes me, however, desirous at the very outset of a short 

 address to ask you for your indulgence, if only on the grounds of 

 being a hard- worked individual with no spare leisure time, indeed, 

 scarcely sufiicient for preserving health. When I accej)ted the 

 honour you have conferred upon me, I had hoped to have been 

 able for a short time ere this, to have trodden afresh those 

 enticing paths of natural sciences in which I had enjoyed myself 

 in my youth, under the guidance of such world-famed leaders as 

 Professors Weissbach, Plattner, Cotta, Breithaupt, and Reich 

 in Grermany, and that fine old Professor Sedgwick at Cambridge. 

 But this has been denied to me, my leisure time has been taken 

 up by being pressed for the last month into the heaviest work of 

 the House of Commons, and being called upon to serve as chair- 

 man of a committee appointed to investigate a group of very 

 important Eailway Bills. These duties are by no means light, for 

 besides necessitating a daily attendance, an amount of continuous 

 attention and brain power is requisite, the strain of which quite 

 unfits one for anything else for the rest of the day, notwithstand- 

 ing after that begins the usual Parliamentary work of the 

 evening. This must be my apology for shortcoming on the 

 present occasion, and for not having been able to give that 

 attention to this address which I should otherwise have wished. 

 Happily, our ancient and well-known Institution covers a very 

 large expanse of ground in its researches and subjects : were 

 this not the case, more hopeless still would have been my task 

 in endeavouring to find any subject matter which would be of 



