202 Address delivered at the sixth and last 



I shall have ceased to address you, our club will have ceased 

 to exist. 



These, however, are but the natural feelings to which we 

 cannot avoid giving utterance, when submitting to any sacri- 

 fice which our better judgment pronounces to be expedient. 

 The present sacrifice is on our part voluntary. We submit 

 to it, or rather I should say we embrace it, because we con- 

 ceive that we have attained the great object of our institution ; 

 and, that object once attained, there remains no further neces- 

 sity for keeping in force the means which have achieved it. I 

 need scarcely remind the friends who surround me, that this 

 club was established at a period when zoology still languished 

 under the unmerited neglect to which it had almost at all 

 times been exposed in this country, and when a few disinte- 

 rested votaries only of the science were found chivalrous 

 enough to devote themselves to an unpopular and an unpro- 

 fitable pursuit. The period, however, was auspicious in 

 promise. A new impulse had begun to operate in every 

 department of science. Whether it owed its origin to the 

 change of events which allowed the minds of our countrymen 

 to subside from the bustle of war and politics into the calmer 

 arts of peace, — ■ or whether to the increased intercourse with 

 our Continental neighbours, and the consequent example set 

 us by a people who at no time suffered even the more gene- 

 rally engrossing avocations of the field or the cabinet to 

 supersede the interests of science, — whatever, in short, may 

 have been the cause, certain it is that a spirit of enquiry had 

 gone forth, which required only encouragement and proper 

 direction to be rendered eminently beneficial in its effects. 

 With a view to these signs of the times, the few leading zoolo- 

 gists of whom we could at that time boast, united themselves 

 into this club ; hoping by this union to impart a wider in- 

 fluence to their own exertions, to stimulate others to partici- 

 pate in their labours, and, above all, to direct a portion of 

 that energetic spirit of enquiry, which they every where saw 

 around them, into the cultivation of their own favourite science. 

 How far they have succeeded in their object, the history of 

 zoology in this country, during the last six years, will fully 

 evince. Even within their own limited circle, and with their 

 contracted means, they effected much, as I shall have occa- 

 sion to point out hereafter. But it was in the impulse origi- 

 nally given by their exertions to the propagation of the 

 science, more particularly by laying the foundation of the 

 Zoological Society, that powerful association, which, with un- 

 limited resources, carried their principles and their objects 

 into execution, that their' agency is to be traced. Under 



