174 THE AYKTON EPISODE 



on Kew and its management which had never been submitted 

 to the Director for answer or comment. Ayrton had caused 

 it to be written by Prof. Owen, who was notoriously hostile 

 to Kew and to its Director for his evidence before the Science 

 Commissioners, and Owen had employed all his great dexterity 

 to belittle Kew and its applications of systematic botany, to 

 urge the transfer of its collections to the British Museum, 

 where they would come under his own government, and to 

 insinuate a bitter personal attack on both the Hookers. 



Nothing could so rouse Hooker as an attack on the memory 

 of his father. He insisted on adding to the parliamentary 

 papers a vigorous and dignified reply. It was easy enough to 

 expose the long string of misrepresentations as to the aims of 

 a Botanic Garden, the actual arrangement of the plants, the 

 need of a first-class herbarium and library at hand, and a dis- 

 ingenuous comparison with the old-time practice of identify- 

 ing plants — to challenge the perversion of Hooker's known 

 views as to the Herbaria at Kew and the British Museum 

 — to dispose of the approved sneer at systematic botany in 

 the herbarium, whose ' net result ' was ' attaching barbarous 

 binomials to dried foreign weeds ' — to repel the false innu- 

 endoes as to the labours and rewards of Hooker and his 

 fellow workers. But his greatest satisfaction was to pulverise 

 the attacks upon his father — not on the strength of his own 

 assertions, but by citing the Treasury Minute which followed 

 the Keport. Did Owen make sidelong appeal for an official 

 enquiry into the benefits received from Kew by the leading 

 gardeners ? He was answered in advance by the Boyal 

 Horticultural Society's address to the Premier, by the meetings 

 of the botanists and the consensus of the gardening papers. 

 Did he impute neglect to introduce new, rare, and beautiful 

 plants ? For five-and-twenty years, from the beginning to 

 the end of Sir William's Directorate, his Botanical Magazine 

 was full of descriptions and illustrations of these. Eagerness 

 to find any handle for attack overreached itself no less signally 

 in specific charges of mismanaging the trees at Kew. Especially 

 there was the great Araucaria. Look how inferior it was 

 to its coeval at Dropmore. Sir William was in fault ! Sir 



