Gentlemen,—Allow me to thank you very cordially for electing me to preside over your meetings during the ensuing Session It is an honour very greatly appreciated by every one who has been selected to fill this chair. Indeed I feel doubly honoured, seeing that I am the first to address you in the new Hall of the Faculty of Actuaries under the gaze of the stony eyes of our own immortal Napier. Your election reminds me that I had the honour of presiding over your earliest meetings and that I also had the pleasure of reading the earliest papers that were presented for your consideration. These three papers I am proud to believe have been diligently perused by nearly every student of Actuarial Science, forming as they do the wicket opening into wider fields, the earliest lessons of the course. They have, as I have been told, been the guiding rays of light which induced some of our most eminent Actuarial stars, presently shining in our firmament, to follow in the pursuit of higher knowledge, and to join the profession. These simple papers have been printed three times, and are again out of print. Gentlemen, I do wish I were able to repeat that enthusiasm. It seems to me now to be a much more simple matter to find language to describe something which one is striving to understand for oneself, and labouring to make clear to one's own comprehension, than to write an essay upon something which appears so plain and so palpable that the wonder is how any one could fail to interpret the language of the symbols.