380 BOTANY : ITS POSITION AND PROSPECTS 
We know to-day how amply science, in the persons of the 
late Sir WilHam Flower and his successors, has fulfilled the 
scientific mission of the Natural History collections at South 
Kensington. The germ of this success lay in the movement 
set afoot by Hooker and Huxley to amend and strengthen 
the influentially signed memorial that laid the case for science 
before the Prince Consort as head of the Kensington Committee. 
The two friends joined forces on w^hat Huxley called their 
' permanent Committee of Public Safety ' to watch over what 
was being done. Huxley, who professed himself ' thoroughly 
roused,' eagerly enhsted the support of the progressive 
among the scientific and the scientifically inclined among 
public men and editors of the Reviews, and as for the atti- 
tude of the Laodiceans in science he writes vritli cheery 
defiance : 
I don't think it is necessary to trouble one's head about 
such opposition. It may be annoying and troublesome, 
but if we are beaten by it we deserve to be. We shall have 
to wade through oceans of trouble and abuse, but so long 
as we gain our end I care not a whistle whether the sweet 
voices of the scientific mob are for or against me. 
A few passages from Hooker's letters may be quoted : 
To T, H. Huxley, 1858 
My present impression is that a compromise may prove 
to be the best thing — anything to keep out of the K. Gore 
people's clutches — and that if we could only satisfy our- 
selves that the Nat. Hist, would certainly be moved w^e 
should without delay apply for a building in the Regent's 
Park, near the Zoolog. Gardens, so arranged that vast 
sufficient Galleries should be filled with enough Birds and 
Beasts for the public to gape at daily, with parallel private 
side galleries where NaturaUsts could daily work (and where 
was the order of the day. Finally the Government ended its partnersliip 
with the Exhibition commissioners, rnd became sole owners of the Kensington 
site. 
A familar nickname for South Kensington and all its works sprang from 
an interim iron building erected in 1855, unjustly supposed to be from Cole's 
designs ; it was popularly known as the Bromptoti Boilers, or shortly ' The 
Boilers.' 
