MODEST AMBITIONS 339 
would give me a house at Kew for the collections, and 
a small salary to engage my working them up for the 
museum and public, and leave me to get a publisher who 
would illustrate, and over whom I should have some hold 
by having the offer of my Journal. I should greatly prefer 
this to having a grant for publication made to me. I shall 
never wTite well for profit, and would willingly give all 
my materials, scientific and popular, to the publisher, 
seeking no profit, but exercising a control over the amount 
of ' illustration ' to be given to both Natural History and 
Journal. 
Friends at home were more than ever eager that the vast 
results of the Indian labours should not be thrown away. 
Dr. Wallich offered his help if Hooker and Thomson should 
take up a Flora of India, joining with them as a preliminary 
in revising the Indian Herbarium at the Linnean. Hooker, 
in reply (June 12, 1850), tells of the hard measure meted out 
by the E.I.G. to Thomson, though he had lost all his splendid 
outfit and collections in the Cabul campaign, and of his own 
slender prospects from the Admiralty and the Geological Survey, 
the latter ' involving work he will not undertake again for the 
price,' though he hoped for some readjustment for the sake of 
a position he much liked. 
To Dr. Wallich 
June 12, 1850. 
Other expectations I have none but a wife to maintain, 
and expensive appearances to keep up. 
As to writing a book of travels, or working up my 
Geology, Physical Geography, or Meteorology — I have no 
thoughts of it. 
Wealth I do not seek ; but it is absolutely necessary 
that I be placed in unembarrassed circumstances to carry 
out the Fl. Ant. and Flora Indica ; it were not expedient 
that I should have even the Geological Survey Work. 
Keputation is a very fine thing, and Botany a very 
charming science, but neither will keep the pot boiling in 
that land of constraint and restraint — England — where my 
prospects are distraint for window-tax and poor-rates, if 
the Woods and Forests will not give me a barn at Kew. 
