12 
VICE-PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
(Read by Louis B. PBOUT, V.P., December 7th, 1909.) 
Our highly-respected President, Mr. A. W. Mera, in his laudable 
desire that the Society shall on the present occasion enjoy something 
novel in its mental pabulum, has imposed upon me a task which I am 
unlikely to be able to carry out with any real satisfaction either to you 
or to myself. I can honestly say that I have had neither the time nor 
the ability of late to keep abreast of those philosophical questions 
which might have interested our more advanced thinkers , nor of the 
doings of British field-entomology during the past season, a topic on 
which I used to be able to hold forth at some length a decade-and-a- 
half ago, when I was in the habit of devouring the contents of The 
Entomologist and The Entomologist 1 s Record with the utmost avidity. 
A specialist is proverbially more or less of a bore, and my time for the 
study of entomology is now so fully occupied with my specialism that 
I have necessarily let go some of the threads which I used to find a 
pleasure in holding—and which perchance I should still find a pleasure 
in holding, were there more than eighteen or nineteen hours’ work in 
the average working day. 
This prologue is not intended to prepare you for a dissertation on 
the classification of the Geometridae or on the distribution of the 
genera and species of the Oenochrominae in Australia—subjects on 
which I have indulgently determined to abstain from addressing you, 
though they have been a good deal in my thoughts ; but it is intended 
to prepare you for a very poor substitute for those interesting 
summaries of the year’s doings among British entomologists which 
have been a valuable feature of our present President’s annual 
addresses. 
I can only say regarding the season of 1909, that the little I have 
read in the magazines or gathered from correspondents or members of 
the Society, gives the impression that it has been below the average 
in general success for the collector. Of course, the bad weather is 
held responsible for a great deal, but it is a question how far we are 
justified in blaming it for the absence of good captures; certainly 
many of the common species of lepidoptera have been plentiful enough, 
and indeed the abundance of autumn larvae in many of our suburban 
gardens has been almost phenomenal. Perhaps not quite enough of 
our collectors are out-and-out enthusiasts, oblivious to the discomforts 
of constant wettings or of collecting in spots that are almost under 
water, to do full justice to the harvest which might be reaped even in 
such a weeping summer as that of 1909. At any rate, as some notes 
from the Isle of Wight state, which I contributed to the last number 
of The Entomologist's Record, I had nothing to complain of in the way 
of scarcity of insects there. By the way, I was told quite recently 
that the meteorological reports for the year so far, showed the actual 
rainfall to be by no means excessive—perhaps rather below the average, 
and no doubt it has been the “continual dropping ” that has worn out 
xix. 
