PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



Gentlemen, 



On an anniversary of this kind, it is both fitting and 

 customary to turn our thoughts first to those who have passed 

 away from us during the current year. Happily, in our own 

 Society, there has been, so far as we are aware, no removal by 

 death ; although the long-continued silence of our former esteemed 

 librarian, Mr. Hoey, who went out to South Africa last year, gives 

 us cause for serious anxiety on his account. 



Outside the pale of our own Society, although in the same field 

 of labour, death has been very busy, and has selected for his 

 victims many whom the foremost amongst us would esteem it an 

 honour to have known. In the first rank of these stands the 

 name of Frederick Smith — that simple-minded, kind-hearted, and, 

 withal, largely gifted senior assistant in the Zoological Depart- 

 ment of the British Museum. It is said by those best able to 

 judge that he was more at home in the field than in the study — 

 there are many of us, I think, who can sympathise with him in 

 this respect — and yet the number of entomological papers pro- 

 duced by him in various scientific journals amounted, at the time 

 of his death, to little short of 150. Some of these were illus- 

 trated by plates drawn and engraved by himself (for in his early 

 years he followed the profession of an engraver), and this fact 

 naturally enhances greatly the value of them. It is as a hymen- 

 opterist that his name will live, and no one who visited the Exhi- 

 bition at the Aquarium, in 1877, can forget his complete and most 

 interesting collection of British bees, nor the gentle courtesy of 

 his manner to those who manifested an interest in them. As an 

 example of his good nature, I shall never forget the wonderful 

 patience with which I saw him accompany two simple old ladies 

 round the Exhibition, with the sole intention apparently of con- 

 vincing them that the large sphingiche were not all death's-heads, 



