1887.] Address. 71 



Staff Corps and Mr. E. Cotes will bring out a list of the Indian moths. 

 Mr. Wood-Mason has been engaged in investigating the disease 

 called pebrine, which affects both the cultivated and wild silkworm, and 

 was so particularly virulent during the last season as to amount to 

 an epidemic. In many cases, whole batches of worms died without 

 spinning any silk, the glandular tissue of the silk-glands and all the 

 other tissues of the body being full of the spore- like bodies that cause 

 the disease and to which the name Nosema bombycis has been given. 

 The Trustees have fitted up a biological laboratory for the prosecu- 

 tion of such studies, and I trust that ere long this essential part of the 

 functions of a State Museum may be established on a firm basis. 



Bombay Societies. — We have to welcome, as fellow- workers in the field 

 of biology, the Bombay Natural History Society and the Bombay An- 

 thropological Society, and trust that they may have a long and useful 

 career before them. But I may be permitted to suggest that they should 

 amalgamate with the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and 

 employ the Journal of that Society for biological as well as for philolo- 

 gical and archaeological purposes as we do ours. 



Vertebrata. — In the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, Mr. W. 

 T. Blanford gives us a complete systematic account of the genus Para- 

 doxurus and describes an apparently new species, P. jerdoni. He 

 reduces the 49 specific names in existence, to 11 species, of which he 

 figures two, P. aureus and P. jerdoni, from the Palni Hills of the Madras 

 Presidency. The same writer has in preparation a work on Indian 

 Mammals which, from his well-known qualifications for the task, will 

 be eagerly looked for by Indian naturalists. In the same Journal, Mr. 

 Oldfield Thomas has a paper on the Mammalia — numbering some 400 

 specimens — presented to the British Museum by our member Mr. A. O. 

 Hume. The collection consisted of a few specimens from Simla, Dehli, 

 the Nilgiris, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, but the great mass 

 of it came from Sambhar, Manipur, Tenasserim, and the Malay penin- 

 sula, whence two new species and one new variety are described and 

 figured. The zoology of the Maldive islands is the subject of a brief 

 note by Mr. C. W. Rosset, and Dr. Sclater presents a notice ' Of the 

 species of wild goats,' including the ibex of the Western Himalaya. 



In the same Journal, Mr. F. H. H. Guillemard has six papers on 

 the birds of the Eastern Archipelago, collected during the voyage of 

 the yacht ' Marchesa,' in which many new species are described. Mr. T. 

 Bowdler Sharpe, too, has commenced his notes on the magnificent series 

 of Indian birds presented to the British Museum by Mr. A. O. Hume, 

 and also gives a notice of some birds from Perak. In the Ibis, M. 

 Menzbier has a list of the birds of the Upper Tarim, Kashgaria ; Major 



