A QUESTION OF PRIORITY 58 



discovering and magnifying a grievance, Hooker amusingly 

 remarks to Darwin, March 29, 1863 : 



Falconer is one of the two classes of Scotchmen that 

 Crawfurd distinguishes as ' Scotsmen ' and ' d d Scots- 

 men.' There are two most curiously antagonistic sides to 

 his character: 



Or as he puts it elsewhere : ' Falconer is a Scotchman, who 

 when once wrong seems never to get right again,' yet ' one of 

 the most honourable men I know, except when out of temper.' 



The other was by Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) in 

 1865. Certainly the material in dispute had first been worked 

 over in English by Lubbock, but it was Danish research con- 

 tained in a Danish memoir. However, these were uneasy 

 times, when confidence had been lowered by the methods of 

 one leader of opinion and those whom he inspired. The 

 suppressed irritation of a quiet man flared out with unhappy 

 results. It was too bad, Hooker agreed with Darwin, to treat 

 an old hero in science thus ; on the other hand, he was not 

 satisfied with the older man's subsequent amende. ' It is not 

 handsome at all, and from an old Prince of Science to a young 

 aspirant is not liberal, I think.', In impartial eyes, if the 

 acerbity of the attack was unwarranted, the explanation was 

 ungracious. Tenacity was at fault on either side, and as 

 Huxley pithily put it, the one had failed to set the affair 

 straight with half a dozen words of frank explanation as he 

 might have done ; the other, ' like all quiet and mild men 

 who do get a grievance, became about twice as " wud " as 

 Berserks like you and me.' Hooker, with a sly hit at his 

 friend's favourite assertion that a ' compiler ' was a greater 

 man than an * observer,' wrote to Darwin (June 2, 1865) : 



This comes of your divine art of Compilation ! Both, as it 

 appears to me, were making capital compilations, and from 

 precisely the same sources and to illustrate the same subject. 



In both cases, as has been said, Hooker's intimacy with 

 the parties concerned enabled him to pour oil on the troubled 

 waters. 



