The Presidential Address. 193
him personally, his friends were unanimous in testifying to
his amiable disposition; and we cannot but express our
sorrow at having lost a promising member who, had he been
spared, would doubtless have taken an active part in the
work of the Club.
At the meeting held on December 17th it was my painful
duty to have to announce the death of Sir Antonio Brady;
and as it is proposed to publish a special memoir of our
deceased member, whose memory is still green among us,
I will not at present give any account of his scientific work,
but will simply put upon record the deep regret which the
removal of this genial elephant-hunter of the Roding Valley
has caused to all those who numbered him among their
friends, and whose death will be felt most severely by our
Club, in which he took such active interest, as well as by the
scientific world in general.
The Essex Field Club is now so well launched on its
career that I do not propose to dwell at any length upon our
past or future work. My appeal to our own members to support
us by their scientific contributions has, I am happy to see,
borne fruit. During the year we have published three Parts
of 'Transactions,' with the 'Journal of Proceedings,' and to
these we may, I think, justly point with some pride, as
evidence of our activity and as a guarantee of future exertion.
Looking back to the line of work as laid down in my
Inaugural Address of February 28th, 1880, I cannot but feel
gratified to think in how short a period we have commenced
to realise the position therein traced out. We have received
this year several most valuable contributions to the lists of
the County Fauna and Flora, and in the next part of our
'Transactions' we shall have the pleasure of seeing Mr.
Henry Laver's lists of the Mammalia and Mollusca, Mr.
Fitch's excellent paper upon the Essex Galls, and Dr. M. C.
Cooke's list of the Hymenomycetal Fungi of the Loughton
District. The papers published during the year are, if I may
say so, typical of the class of subjects which our Society
claimed at the outset as proper to the studies of a Field Club.
Thus in Natural History we have Mr. White's suggestive
2 A