370 BOTANY: ITS POSITION AND PBOSPECTS 
but without some recognised place of resort that will fulfil 
the conditions of being a rendezvous for ourselves, an in- 
citement to our friends to take an interest in Nat. Hist., 
and at the same time a profitable intellectual resort, — we 
shall be always ignorant of one another's whereabouts and 
writings. (The above is not English grammar but never 
mind that.) 
The convivial plan was tried in the Eed Lions ^ and has 
signally failed, as will any other that has no other aim but 
personal gratification of a kind that can but be got by 
dropping Science altogether, and admitting the rag-tag and 
bobtail of Literature and the Arts together with the dregs 
of Scientific Society. We want some place where we never 
should be disappointed of finding something worth going 
out for. A good Society well stocked with periodicals etc. 
answers these conditions and I wish we had one. 
Ever your bore, 
Jos. D. Hooker. 
From the moment of his return from India the outlook 
was depressing. ' Botany,' he exclaims to Bentham early 
in 1852, 
Botany is going down rapidly it appears to me ; the 
Botanists die and take their mantles with them. Reeve 
[the pubhsher] talks seriously, almost positively, of giving 
up Bot. Magazine and Journal (Icones of course) ; ^ he hangs 
fire with my New Zealand Flora. I don't find one single 
Botanist started up since I went abroad ; many are dead. 
Something it appears to me may be done by a combined 
movement in the Universities ; is it a time ? 
It was little better in December 1856, when he writes to 
Harvey apropos of his reluctance to apply to the Royal Society 
for part of the Government grant in order to publish his re- 
searches, for being his own lithographer he would appear to 
seek pay for his own handiwork : 
1 The Red Lion Club, presumably taking its name from Red Lion Court, 
the depot of the British Association, was a dining club founded in 1839 which 
met during the British Association Meetings. A frequently schoolboyish jollity 
with no further aim or result made no appeal to Hooker. 
^ Sir W. J. Hooker's periodicals. 
