BOTANY AT OXFOED AND CAMBEIDGE 383 
Botanical Fellowship or two might be insisted upon, from 
whom the Professors should be chosen. Kooms and £50 
a year should do a great deal for a Herbarium, supposing 
it to have the superintendence and zealous curatorship of 
a working Professor, such as Henslow would have made 
before he got his Father's living, or as Berkeley might now. 
Though there was at first no very reassuring answer from 
friends in either University, affairs straightened themselves 
out. By March 16 Henslow is told that 
Oxford is inclined to behave much more handsomely than 
we anticipated, offers £1000 for a building, £50 and a good 
suite of rooms for a keeper, and £25 for annual increase — 
constant accessibility to the pubhc without a Master of Arts 
or any other drawback. 
On Bentham's advice Mrs. Fielding withdrew some of 
her conditions ; the gift was accepted, and before long a 
curator was found in the person of Maxwell Masters,^ of whom 
Hooker wrote to Harvey : 
We are hunting for a curator for Hb. Fielding. I hope 
young Masters will get it, a fine lad setat. 20 who has just 
finished a most distinguished medical education at King's 
College and took medals galore — is son of Masters, nursery- 
man at Canterbury, and early passionately attached to 
&c., &c., &c., &c., &c., &c. It is only £50 and two rooms 
at present and worth no one's having but a scrub's, or a 
man who will take zealously to science and trust to provi- 
dence for a future competence as a Botanist. I have a great 
idea that a good Botanist and good Herb, would advance 
science greatly in the Univs. Daddy cannot see it somehow, 
but I had Masters out to dinner yesterday and the old Gent, 
takes to him — a mere scrub or half educated man would 
lower the position of Botanical Science in the eyes of ignorant 
bigoted Oxford (I hope I do not offend your High Church ears), 
1 Maxwell Tylden Masters (1833-1907) was a pupil of Edward Forbes 
and of Lindley at King's College, and Sub-Curator of the Fielding Herbarium. 
After standing unsuccessfully against Henfrey for the Chair of Botany at King's 
College in 1854, he took up general practice, but lectiu-ed on Botany at St. 
George's Hospital and edited the Gardeners' Chronicle after Lindley's death 
in 1865, besides writing many botanical monographs. 
