Iviii PEOCEE DINGS OF THE 



Gentlemen, 



Mr annual Report on the state and proceedings of our Society might 

 be made almost in the same words, and with nearly the same satis- 

 factory figures, as last year. Our publications have been equally 

 extensive, entailing an expenditure of about £760 ; <£82 have been 

 applied to the purchase and binding of books, and .£200 have been 

 added to our invested capital, which now amounts to £1800. We 

 are now subject to some temporary inconvenience from the darkening 

 of our rooms by the new building of the lloyal Academy ; but I 

 understand that all the difficulties which stood in the way of the 

 proposed new wings and fagade towards Piccadilly have been got 

 over, and that the work will shortly be commenced. I trust, there- 

 fore, that our new appartments will be ready for us before we are 

 obliged to vacate our present ones. 



I propose in the following address to lay before you a sketch of 

 the progi-ess of biological science during the two years that have 

 elapsed since my last review in my Address of 1866 ; and for this 

 purpose I have again been enabled to avail myself of the kind assist- 

 ance of Mr. W. S. Dallas, to whom I am indebted for the zoological 

 information contained in the following pages. In a few occasional 

 notes on the value of some of the various contributions made to our 

 science, I have endeavoured to keep in mind the three great aims of 

 the working naturalist :. — 1st, the accurate observation and delinea- 

 tion of facts, morphographic or biographic ; 2nd, the coordination of 

 these facts ; and, 3rd, their generalization, this being the only course 

 of proceeding which safely tends to a real advance in our knowledge 

 of the phenomena of organic life. In the present state of science, 

 the second process, the carefal coordination of facts and observa- 

 tions, becomes daily more important. Individual species, subspecies, 

 or varieties are described, individual observations are committed to 

 pi'int, in such endless variety and confusion, with repetitions so fre- 

 quent, in publications so varied, that the general naturalist is little dis- 

 posed to waste time in searching them out, until they are more or less 

 collected, methodized, and compared with their nearest allies. Hence 

 it is that Faunas or Floras, complete as to any special branch of 

 either great class of beings, monographs of orders, tribes, or other 

 large groups, connected treatises on special series of biological phe- 

 nomena, even of very limited range, if carefully and comparatively 

 worked out, are of infinitely greater value than long descriptions of 

 new species, or of isolated experiments or observations in however 



