82 KEW, ST. PETEESBUEG, AND MAEOCCO 



the wrong side of my bank book, and the more I get somehow 

 the larger that balance gets ! 



Then, too, no one can help me much no one can write 

 this letter to you ! and having grown with the growth of 

 this Establishment, I know too much and can do too much : 

 * Knowledge is power ' till it becomes overpowering. I 

 shall certainly go in for an aid to Smith (the Curator) ; he 

 will else break down. I am of tougher metal and coarser 

 fibre. 



But six years later he proclaims to Huxley with grateful 

 astonishment the merits of a Government so rarely anything 

 but grudging towards science : ' My Lords snubbed a deputa- 

 tion in favour of opening the Garden in the forenoon on the 

 ground of its being injurious to Botanical Science I ' 



His official position as Director also demanded some sacrifices 

 to Society in the way of dining out in London ; but delightful 

 as such meetings with friends might be, at the Lyells' or the 

 Spottiswoodes', for instance, he had to confess, as he breaks 

 off from writing to Darwin in order to get on with * Genera 

 Plantarum,' that * these London dinners are the ruin of science.' 



A fixed income and a family of six helped to tie him down. 

 Moreover : 



There is no fun in a holiday when you know that work 

 is piling up mountains high at home meanwhile. So I shall 

 carry on, with stunsails alow and aloft, till the end of the 

 chapter. (To Sir W. Macleay, September 4, 1868.) 



So to Darwin also he lets himself go in 1869 apropos of 

 the accumulations of correspondence awaiting him on his 

 return from St. Petersburg and the general pressure of official 

 demands upon his time. June 24 : 



How I wish I could join you in Wales, but it is impossible. 

 I have a pile of letters that appal myself, and I am not easily 

 frightened plus a large unopened box of documents and 

 pamphlets accumulated during my absence. I too sometimes 

 wish myself in a tomb, though I hold that the balance of 

 life is always on the side of enjoyment, and that the bitterness 

 of the bitterest loss is an insufficient measure of the enjoy- 

 ment we had in the object lost. 



