Sir William Flower. 87 



Englishman may be proud to wear, and bestowed, as I believe it to be, 

 with the sanction of the very few who have already got it. It is the 

 one order which real work, apart from rank and wealth and courtiers' 

 tricks, alone can win. " It was truly " the blue ribbon of literary and 

 scientific decorations," as another distinguished friend wrote. Sir 

 William was also appointed in 1881 a trustee of Sir John Soane's 

 Museum. 



One side of Sir William's life deserves special notice, viz., his social 

 influence, and the endeavour to popularise the great institutions with 

 which he was officially connected. These influences, developed at the 

 Museum of the College of Surgeons with great success, were brought to 

 bear on a much wider circle in connection with the National Museum 

 and as President of the Zoological Society ; and no one was more fitted 

 than he either for the courtly circle or the large gatherings of work- 

 ing men who flocked on Saturday afternoons to the galleries of the 

 Museum. In all his many and varied social functions in his prominent 

 positions he was ably seconded by one who identified herself with his 

 every engagement, and to whom his last volume of collected addresses 

 is dedicated. A man of wide sympathies : he is found at one time 

 addressing a civil service dinner, at another a volunteer gathering, now 

 descanting on evolution to a church congress, and, again, speaking at a 

 mayoral banquet, a girls' school, or an industrial exhibition. The strain 

 on his physique demanded by these efforts would have been great to 

 an ordinary man, but it must have been serious to one whose main 

 energies were heavily taxed by exhausting scientific work. His power- 

 ful constitution was thus slowly but surely sapped, yet to an eager 

 mind and a generous heart, such as his, little heed was paid to himself. 



The social side of Sir William's life and his sympathy with the 

 affairs of men were further exemplified in his many communications to 

 the ' Times ' and other journals. Some of these were written in the 

 cause of animals, such as that pleading for the bottle-nosed whales 

 which were to be ruthlessly slaughtered as the devourers of food-fishes, 

 or for the protection of birds, as in the appeal to ladies not to wear 

 white heron's or egret's feathers, since the birds were killed when nest- 

 ing or attending their young. Others dealt with what may be called 

 international zoology, as the Behring Sea question (and he also selected 

 the British naturalist who visited the region). Amongst other zoologi- 

 cal subjects were the preparation of aratomical specimens for museums, 

 Emin Pasha's collection, kingfishers' nests, and dwarfs of Central 

 Africa. He also advocated the placing of a statue of Huxley beside 

 that of Owen and Darwin in the entrance hall of the British Museum, 

 so that "Huxley and Owen, often divided in their lives, would come 

 together after death in the most appropriate place and amidst the most 

 appropriate surroundings. " He descanted also on subjects so varied as 

 the burial of the dead in slight frames and sandy soil, on Cleopatra's 



