310 RETIREMENT, TO 1897 : DARWINIANA, ETC. 



To {Sir] F. Darwin 



I am in for an eloge of Robert Brown for the Linnean 

 Anniversary and am re-reading his miscellaneous writings 

 with increased admiration. I know no botanical writings 

 at all comparable to those on Morphology, taxonomy and 

 classification, for sagacity, profundity, range of knowledge, 

 scrupulous accuracy and clearness. He took in the whole 

 phaBnogamic kingdom. Every young botanist should go 

 through a course of reading these miscellaneous works. 

 They are as much above all others as Wellington's despatches 

 are to those of subsequent warriors. 



However, he now found the dinners which accompanied 

 these functions oppressive, and refused every such invitation 

 that it was possible to refuse. 



To the Same 



May 31, 1888. 



I really cannot martyr myself any more to dinners of the 

 kind they completely knock me up. I was ill the whole 

 day following the Newton function, and again now after 

 the Linnean. Not a week now passes without my having 

 pressing invitations of this kind another came by the same 

 post with your letter. 



By way of exception, he attended the Ipswich meeting of 

 the British Association in 1895 in honour of the inauguration 

 of Botany as a separate section, and in June 1896 the Kelvin 

 Jubilee at Glasgow ; otherwise meetings, like public dinners, 

 were avoided, especially the distant conference of botanists 

 at Berlin in 1893. Paris being more accessible, he would 

 have attended, as a * very old Associate/ the centenary of 

 the Academie des Sciences in October 1895, and actually 

 began to * grind away at a conversation book' to rub up 

 his * wretched French,' the chief drawback to such a visit, 

 but circumstances counselled prudence, so that he wrote to 

 his friend La Touche (October 22) : 



I was not sorry to give up the Paris trip. I like seeing 

 festivities but not taking part in them ; I can hardly speak 

 French intelligibly cannot converse at all and I dreaded 



