CHAPTEK XXI 
SCIENCE ORGANISATION : SOCIETIES, JOURNALS AND REWARDS 
Though the organisation of Science at the Universities and 
other centres of education was important, more important still 
was its organisation through the learned societies, partly as 
meeting places for scientific workers, partly as providing the 
means of making scientific results easily accessible through 
their publications. Where these were inadequate to the 
necessities of the case, estabhshed journals of Hterary repute 
might be taken into alHance, publishing a scientific column 
regularly, or, in the last resort, a Keview entirely devoted to 
Science might be set afoot. How heavy a burden such non- 
original and administrative work imposed on very busy men 
was to be learned from experience. 
One conclusion to which it pointed appears from a letter 
to Huxley in the spring of 1861, when Bentham, who with 
characteristic modesty never claimed to be more than an 
amateur in botany, was proposed as President of the Linnean, 
a post he held from 1861 to 1874. 
Kew : Wednesday. 
You know my prejudice against professional Scientifics 
being Presidents of these heterogeneous bodies : and in 
favoar of independent men who make a bond of union between 
Science as represented by the Society and the outer v>rorld 
— and who if really Scientific, are so as amateurs. Bentham 
is one such, and for the life of me I cannot find another at 
all eligible on the whole list. 
On the other hand the methods of the societies which 
combined Science with ' Society ' and Honised travellers before 
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