The benign personification of our Society as The Old Lady is a homage which endears itself the more as the years increase enjoyment of her service. We endow her with comeliness, and recognize both her caprice and her gift of growing old more gracefully than her critics, while acquiring in the process, after a wild youth by present-day standards, the sovereign qualities of experience and good sense. Nor does she lack the power of innovation which five years ago led her to choose my distinguished predecessor as her first Lady President. The quality of Dr. Joan Evans's scholarship is well known to all, but fortune has bestowed upon her other gifts as well. She is peculiarly fortunate in her ancestral connexions with the Society and in her ability to exercise in our favour an unstinting generosity. Wealth attracts wealth: during her office and indeed within her family orbit, the spontaneous munificence of Miss Minet rescued the Society from penury and made it possible to set our house in order.