35 
Mr. J. W. Tutt then read the following : 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
Gentlemen, 
I have arrived at the termination of my year of office as President 
of your Society, and have reached that point of time when it is 
customary for the retiring President to address a few words to you on 
the subject which interests us all so deeply. 
There is no need for me to refer in detail to the present position of 
the business affairs of the Society. This your Treasurer and 
Secretaries will already have done, I trust, to your satisfaction. One 
regret only occurs, viz., that we have not admitted into our ranks 
anything like the number of new members that one might reasonably 
expect, had every member done all in his power. I wish to lay stress 
on this, because our power as a scientific society is crippled for want 
of funds, due to our small membership. But, leaving aside the purely 
business aspect of the question, I have to congratulate you on the 
position your members have taken in the scientific work of the year. 
It will, perhaps, not be deemed out of place if I specially mention the 
efforts made by our members, Messrs. Bacot and Prout, in the more 
technical branches of entomological science. 
I would also refer to the general advance in the quality of the 
scientific remarks made in connection with ordinary exhibits. In the 
early days of my connection with this and similar societies, it was 
customary to find members exhibiting strange aberrations, or their 
captures, with a gratified smile, but with no remark whatever con¬ 
necting the said captures with any scientific fact, or with any 
explanatory notes as to the probable cause of the strange aberration. 
This rarely occurs now-a-days, and, when it does occur, one feels 
almost the same thrill of respeot in the presence of the exhibitor that 
the early naturalists must have felt when they knowingly examined 
the palaeontological remains of their early ancestors. Still, there can 
be no doubt that there is yet room for improvement in the quality of 
the notes offered, and one could well wish that when a striking 
aberration of a species is exhibited, that the exhibitor would take the 
trouble (1) to describe the aberration carefully, and (2) to look up the 
records of similar aberrations in the magazines, and thus give us food 
for reflection in a more generalised way, than the mere exhibition of 
an odd aberration can possibly do. 
This leads me to call your attention to another matter, viz., the 
evident ignorance sometimes displayed about the contents of the 
current magazines, and an ignorance of what has been previously 
written about special work under discussion. There are evidently mem¬ 
bers of scientific societies who still think that they can keep abreast of 
entomological science without reading either the current magazines or 
studying the work published in the transactions of our leading 
societies—men, who still tell us Newman’s and Stainton’s opinions of 
matters entomological, and know nothing of the alteration of opinion 
that these author’s published after their books were written, nor the 
corrections of their errors by a later race of entomologists. On this 
head I would offer a word of advice, and that is, that our young 
members who would make a set of the back volumes of the entomo¬ 
logical magazines their first purchase when setting about the formation 
