PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 1892. 



Gentlemen, , 



There is a duty always imposed upon the President 

 of a Society such as this, which, if he were a particularly 

 modest man, would almost make him pause before accepting 

 the ofifice, were it not for the wise and prudent arrangement 

 by which the duty is deferred until the term of office has 

 expired. It is the duty of delivering a Presidential Address ! 



Not that I wish to suggest that there is any difficulty in 

 addressing you, when some subject of immediate interest is 

 before us — some rare capture or possible novelty, or some 

 observation in Natural History of special interest ; but to draw 

 up an Address, while conscious how often the same thing has 

 been done before — and how well — is a very different under- 

 taking, the trouble being to find words or subjects which shall 

 have some sort of fresh and living interest, and be something 

 more than a mere hash-up of trite and well-worn material. 



Always new, and always interesting, are the discoveries and 

 observations of the season immediately passing, and this fact 

 enables me to place in the fore-front of my remarks the work 

 which has been done this last year in more perfectly recording 

 and figuring earlier stages of the larvae of our British butter- 

 flies, not only because the butterflies are perhaps the most 

 generally attractive of all insects, but because the work has 

 bten accomplished almost wholly by members of our own 

 Society. To our friends, Mr. Frohawk, Mr, Hawes, and 

 Mr. H. Williams, is due the credit of greatly increasing our 

 knowledge of such species as Colias hyale, C. edusa, 

 Polyommatus cegon, Hesperia lima, Hesperia lineola, and Cyclo- 

 pides paniscuSy and in at least one instance a gross and oft- 

 repeated error has been corrected. 



Valuable contributions have also been made to our know- 

 ledge of structure in the earlier stages of Acronycta, Cerura, 

 and other genera, by Dr. Algernon Chapman. 



In actual novelties the year has been comparatively barren, 

 a condition of things which has previously been noticed to 

 occur when the more brilliant and striking day-flying species 

 have been, as in the past year, unusually abundant. In 



