PLUKALITIES WITHOUT SINECUKES 375 
fairly profitable and useful life than that of a scientific man 
who is really attached to his pursuits. 
The same note is sounded in correspondence with Harvey, 
who, a month before (October 1856), had returned from his 
three years' cruise in the Indian Ocean and Australia, and 
had been elected to the chair of Botany in Dublin ^ : 
[Nov. 1856.] You know that I am not a sanguine man, 
and yet I can see that you have in yourself, with an unem- 
barrassed hfe, abundant resources for a fair income, and I 
am sure that you have resources in your collections and 
previous career for continuing the life of a pure man of 
science, with honor and profit to yourself and to the lasting 
benefit of science. I would much rather see you the Curator 
of Trin. Coll. Herb, on £100 and free of all Lectureships 
whatever than hampered with even the Botanical. 
The serious matter was that to the Botanical chair at 
Dublin various duties had been attached, seemingly ' pluralities 
without sinecures,' as Hooker defined them, and especially 
the duty of lecturing on Natural History at large, for was not 
Botany a part of Natural History ? Hooker, backed by his 
father, strongly urged the inexpediency of taking up a Zoo- 
logical Professorship in any shape at all, joint or disjoint : 
[Nov. 25, 1856.] I cannot say that I at all stomach your 
Zoological lectures and duties, not from any aversion to 
Zoology or to your joint Professorship, so much as because 
it will involve all sorts of other minor and major zoological 
inroads upon your time. You talk of lecturing on hwerte- 
hrata a^B if they were nothing ; do just read Huxley's lectures 
in the Medical Times ; they are admirable, though in saying 
so I feel like the old Scotch wife who said, ' Ae, it was a grand 
discourse, I couldna understand the ane half of it.' By 
Jove, the whole science seems to be so changed to what I 
learned, and the literature of any one such small Order as 
Annelida or Rhizopod or Cestoid worm ! so overwhelming, 
and the new facts so revolutionary, that I cannot fancy any 
1 See p. 400. 
