142 THE PRESIDENCY OF THE EOYAL SOCIETY 



a tremendous affair, I suppose the fullest known for many 

 years ; twice as many, as ever known, but very fatiguing for 

 me. How I did pity the President of the United States ! 



And in 1877 he gets home from the same function at half- 

 past one in the morning, ' with a crick in my shoulder and 

 " phalangitis " from pump-handling some 500 people.' 



In regard to the vivisection question, Hooker, as a botanist, 

 was less actively concerned with the agitation of the seventies 

 than were the biologists. But with entire appreciation of the 

 interests and principles involved, he cordially joined in the 

 protest of science against the sweeping prohibitions which 

 perhaps did more honour to the heart than the head of their 

 proposers, who seemed to make no moral distinction between 

 the wanton infliction of pain and the infliction of pain per se, 

 and to justify their attitude by denying what was the 

 cumulative experience of peace and war, the value to suffer- 

 ing mankind of treatment based upon experiments on living 

 animals. 1 



Examples may here be given of some of the difficulties 

 which beset the ' referees ' on whose judgment depends the 

 acceptance or rejection of a paper submitted to a learned 

 society. 



In 1866 a paper had been submitted to the Linnean Society 

 dealing with a subject on which Hooker's friend Col. Munro, 

 the authority on Indian grasses, was at work. Munro hoped 

 to have early sight of it to quote in relation to his own research. 

 When Hooker, seeing that it would not be helpful in providing 

 systematic references, simply wrote that he was not sending it, 

 just as he would have written if Munro had never heard of 

 its existence, his friend apparently was seized with alarm 

 lest Hooker should have some hidden meaning. Hooker 

 hastened to explain how he had misled him, or forgotten some- 

 thing which he ought to have remembered. 



1 Of Lord Carnarvon's ' Act to amend the law relating to Cruelty to Animals ' 

 which followed the report of the Commission in 1876, a writer in Nature (1876, 

 p. 248) remarks : ' The evidence on the strength of which legislation was recom- 

 mended went beyond the facts ; the report went beyond the evidence, and the 

 bill can hardly be said to have gone beyond the recommendation, but rather 

 to have contradicted them.' 



