AN x\SSISTANT NEEDED AT KEW 345 
Thomson * a regular Planchon for acuteness.' But, with all 
his cleverness, he was, it seems, flighty and unstable, and he 
had unaccountably broken with Kew and the friends to whom 
he had expressed such gratitude and devotion. 
An assistant [writes Hooker to his father on Feb. 1, 1849] 
is now your chief requisite, and I wish I were at home to 
help you in this and other matters. It is the only draw- 
back to my thorough enjoyment dming my journeyings, 
that you should miss me in some cases where two pairs 
of eyes and hands, nay two whole heads and bodies are 
wanted. 
And he urges his father to engage at once a man who seems 
suitable, using his Navy half-pay to secure him rather than 
lose the chance of an ho7iest, careful, industrious man. 
Soon after his return to England a long standing anomaly 
in Sir Wilham's position at Kew was remedied. Though 
Director he had had no official residence in the grounds ; the 
great herbarium, which was one of the scientific mainstays 
of the Gardens, was his private property. He had brought 
it with him from Glasgow ; it was the one valuable inheritance 
he could leave to his son, and at his death was liable to be 
removed or dispersed if that son had not the means of main- 
taining it at Kew or elsewhere. Until 1853, for all its public 
utility, it was housed and maintained at his private expense 
in the ' three-storied, many-roomed ' house at West Park, 
two-thirds of a mile from the Gardens,^ ' a very pretty, genteel 
and comfortable residence ' (in Dawson Turner's Johnsonian 
phrase), which, exclaims Hooker, ' has always been an incubus 
to me, so large in itself, while still your collections and Her- 
barium are outgrowing it 1 ' These, with the study and 
artist's room, occupied thirteen rooms, while Sir Wilham's 
expenses all along far exceeded his official salary. 
At length, however, a change came about. First, the 
house in the Gardens belonging to Aiton, the late super- 
intendent, fell vacant at his death in October 1849. It now 
1 The grounds of West Park, 7| acre? i3 extent, are now occupied by the 
Kew and Richmond Sewage Works. 
