370 BOTANY : ITS POSITION AND PEOSPECTS 



^ but without some recognised place of resort that will fulfil 

 the conditions of being a rendezvous for ourselves, an in- 

 citement to our friends to take an interest in Nat. Hist., 

 and at the same time a profitable intellectual resort, — we 

 shall be always ignorant of one another's whereabouts and 

 writings. (The above is not English grammar but never 

 mind that.) 



The convivial plan w^as tried in the Eed Lions ^ and has 

 signally failed, as will any other that has no other aim but 

 personal gratification of a kind that can but be got by 

 dropping Science altogether, and admitting the rag-tag and 

 bobtail of Literature and the Arts together with the dregs 

 of Scientific Society. We want some place where we never 

 should be disappointed of finding something worth going 

 out for. A good Society well stocked with periodicals etc. 

 answers these conditions and I wish we had one. 

 j^v Ever your bore, 



Jos. D. Hooker. 



From the moment of his return from India the outlook 

 was depressing. * Botany,' he exclaims to Bentham early 

 in 1852, 



Botany is going down rapidly it appears to me ; the 

 Botanists die and take their mantles with them. Eeeve 

 [the pubhsher] talks seriously, almost positively, of giving 

 up Bot. Magazine and Journal (Icones of course) ; ^ he hangs 

 fire with my New Zealand Flora. I don't find one single 

 Botanist started up since I went abroad ; many are dead. 

 Something it appears to me may be done by a combined 

 movement in the Universities ; is it a time ? 



It was little better in December 1856, when he writes to 

 Harvey apropos of his reluctance to apply to the Eoyal Society 

 for part of the Government grant in order to publish his re- 

 searches, for being his own lithographer he would appear to 

 seek pay for his own handiwork : 



^ The Red Lion Club, presumably taking its name from Red Lion Court, 

 the depot of the British Association, was a dining club founded in 1839 which 

 met during the British Association Meetings. A frequently schoolboyish jollity 

 with no further aim or result made no appeal to Hooker. 



' Sir W. J. Hooker's periodicals. 



