344 THE RETUKN FROM INDIA 
scheme, would have been his with the rank of surgeon on 
board the Maeander. 
Feehng that he could manage on his allowance, he had 
refused while in Sikkim to apply to the Indian Government 
for any grant in aid of his costly and laborious expedition to 
the snows, or to allow Hodgson to appeal on his behalf ; but 
Campbell, before a similar disclaimer could reach him, had 
made representations to the Government, who generously 
granted him £100 to cover the cost of feeding his cooHes, subject 
to the approval of the East India Company. However un- 
willing to ask, he was much gratified in accepting the proffered 
grant, and was free to spend the more on his collections and 
on scientific instruments. His total expenditure was £2,200 ; 
the official allowances were £1,200 : the remainder was con- 
tributed from his own and his father's purse. 
As for a permanency in the future, he had no wish to take 
up such a post as the directorship of the Botanical Gardens 
in Ceylon, offered to him on the death of his friend Gardner 
in 1849. Lideed his constant wish was to be settled at Kew. 
His father was short-handed. His former curator, Dr. J. E. 
Planchon,! had left him suddenly : ' Citoyen Planchon ' or 
simply ' the Citoyen ' as he was playfully nicknamed, Planchon 
of whom Hooker writes home amid the Revolutionary breezes 
of 1848 : 
I hope Planchon won't be going to Paris now ! He will 
be drawn (for a soldier) and quartered (not in Barracks), if 
he does not take better care. I doubt if the Repubhcans 
are so civil as were Napoleon's soldiers, who, at the battle 
of the Pyramids, gave the word, ' au miheu, les femmes, 
les anes, et les savants.' 
The little man, to whom the Hookers were much attached, 
was a paragon of botanical acumen, winning a second nick- 
name from the ' 9a touche ' with which he invariably clinched 
a botanical argument ; it was the highest praise to call T. 
^ He afterwards attained great eminence as Professor of Botany in Mont- 
pellier, where in his researches on the Phylloxera he discovered the only cui'e 
for this pest — namely, the grafting of the ordinary vino on the nearly immune 
stocks of American species. 
