VOYAGE OF THE CHALLENGE!* 189 



from the Voyage of the Challenger, 1 and the care and working 

 out of the valuable collections made. Here, as usual with 

 scientific expeditions, the Boyal Society had furnished the 

 Government with * instructions ' for the scientific plan of 

 campaign, had found the workers and published results. On 

 the return of the expedition the Natural History Department 

 of the British Museum, moved by Professor Owen, laid claim 

 to the collections and the right of describing them, though 

 the British Museum authorities had never shown the smallest 

 interest in the expedition, and the Museum itself was a place 

 where a naturalist could only work for a very limited time 

 daily, and inaccessible to Sir Wyville Thomson at Edinburgh. 

 It fell to Hooker to uphold the credit of the Society and inci- 

 dentally of its President, easily showing that the precedents 

 invoked were irrelevant and the allegations unfounded, that 

 the sending of Boss's collections to Kew instead of the British 

 Museum was diversion of public property. The collections 

 were Boss's own, to be disposed of as he pleased. 



All this additional work was a heavy burden, and at Kew 

 the period after his wife's death was one of excessive mental 

 and physical strain. This was accentuated by the refusal of 

 the Office of Works to forward his application for assistance, 

 so that he was compelled to appeal to the Treasury direct. 

 Yet he was able to write indomitably to his old friend on 

 January 14, 1875 : 



To Charles Darwin 



I have 15 Committees of the B.S. to attend to. I cannot 

 tell you what relief they are to me — matters are so ably and 

 quietly conducted by Stokes, Huxley, and Spottiswoode 

 [the Secretaries and Treasurer] that to me they are of the 



1 This voya 6 e of oceanic research lasted from Dec. 1872 to May 1876. The 

 scientific observers were under (Sir) C. Wyville Thomson. [Sir Charles Wyville 

 Thomson (1830-82), after holding several professorships in Ireland, was elected 

 to the chair of Natural History at Edinburgh in 1870. The value of his deep 

 sea researches with Carpenter and Gwyn Jeffreys on the Lightning and the 

 Porcupine led to the despatch of the Challenger expedition (1872-6) with 

 Thomson as head of the scientific staff. Besides scientific papers, he wrote The 

 Depths of the Sea, 1873, and The Voyage of the Challenger in the Atlantic, 1877. 

 But he did not live to complete the reports on the Challenger material, which 

 were entrusted to (Sir) John Murray.] 



