PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 1890. 



Gentlemen, 



With the conclusion of the Society's year of 1890, 

 allow me to thank you for the very kind and generous manner 

 in which you have supported me in the meetings over which 

 I have had the pleasure of presiding. I have, however, the 

 serious regret, that my enforced absence did not permit me 

 to be with you during the latter weeks of the year ; and 

 especially that the same reason debars my reading to you 

 to-night the customary Presidential Address. 



Tempted by its surroundings of beauty and Entomological 

 associations, I was induced last summer to occupy one of 

 those quaintly old-fashioned houses in Surrey, which were 

 built in the pre-historic times of sanitation ; hence my present 

 absence from England in the Riviera, after a sharp attack of 

 typhoid fever. 



I am not at all certain, whether I am not to be congratulated 

 on this absence from London, during the rigours of a dread- 

 fully severe winter. Not that one finds in these reputedly 

 warm climes the enervating atmosphere of a sunny south. 

 The cold wave which has so long hung over northern Europe, 

 has, in part, also come southward since the end of the first 

 week of January. For the past week has been seen around 

 these parts, the unusual sight of snow-covered mountains, and 

 that lovely tract of land between them and the sea shore, 

 called the Riviera, white with snow. Date-palms of great 

 size have fronds bending beneath its weight ; while orange 

 trees, still laden with fruit, have each leaf decked out with 

 tiny patches of white, much like that joy of our youth, but 

 botanical anomaly, the Christmas-tree. On the sides of the 

 mountains, shrubs of rosemary crop up from among frozen 

 snow, while bearing upon their branches heavy masses of 

 bloom. This plant is here abundantly wild, as is also the 

 lavender. By the sides of country lanes one sees numberless 



