Society for the Protection of Birds.—No 15 H. 
PROCEEDINGS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING 
OF THE 
SOCIETY for tie PROTECTION of BIRDS. 
19 0 2 . 
T HE Annual Meeting of the Society was held on Wednesday, 
February 26th, 1902, at the Westminster Palace Hotel, 
London, under the presidency of Sir George Kekewich, K.C.B., 
Secretary of the Board of Education. 
The Chairman in moving that the Annual Beport for 1901 be 
adopted and circulated, said he had had the greatest possible 
pleasure in accepting the invitation to take the Chair. It was an 
advantage to know that the meeting was not likely to be of a 
polemical character, and that they would be all of one mind and 
all enthusiastic in promoting the objects of the Society. He might 
class himself with the most enthusiastic. He liked to live in the 
country among the haunts of birds and among flowers and fields, 
even though he had to take a daily journey to this great city. He 
held that the objects of the Society were in complete accord with 
the work of the great office of which he was the permanent head, 
the Board of Education. His duty at that office was to wage a 
continual contest against the forces of ignorance and inhumanity 
and against what he might call the Philistinism of life. That 
Philistinism was opposed not only to the goodwill of man towards 
man, but also to the goodwill of man towards the creatures which 
were the ornament of the world, and were, in fact, essential in its 
organisation. He thought that he might say that the ignorance 
existing with regard to the subject with which the Society was 
concerned was almost hereditary. The only real remedy seemed to 
him to be to educate the children in the truth. The better class of 
public opinion was on the side of the Society, but there were several 
sections of the people that needed to be converted. First of all there 
was that section of the ladies—but he hoped that it was an increas¬ 
ingly small section—who continued to ornament their heads with 
spoils of birds. To his mind there was something utterly 
incongruous in plumes being taken from such birds as birds of 
