406 SCIENCE ORGANISATION : SOCIETIES, ETC. 
making very sure of the value of their reports, were as re- 
pugnant to Hooker as they were to his friend Huxley. The 
present generation can remember the laughable explosion of 
the de Eougemont boom which took place at a meeting of the 
British Association : a much more notable personage with a 
tale of tropical exploration and hunting and discoveries in 
natural history provoked a furore in 1861, followed by a 
storm of criticism which has never been definitely settled, the 
most balanced opinion being that very probably what he said 
was substantially true, but that no less probably his so-called 
experiences, which were not borne out by subsequent reports 
from local collectors, had merely been gathered from hunters 
on the coast. 
The man [mites Hooker to Dr. Anderson,^ July 7, 1861] 
is a victim of IMurchison's honizing system : an unscientific 
bad observer is raised to a first-rate scientific geographical 
Hon, and after that has to wTite a book to justify all the fuss 
made about him. The poor man is honest enough in pur- 
pose, but is dizzy with all that has been done to him and 
unable at any time to write — he exposes himself awfully of 
course.^ 
But this Leonine Heresy was not without a medicinal 
value. 
1 Thomas Anderson (1832-70), botanist, M.D. Edin. 1853, entered Bengal 
medical service in 1854. Director of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, organised 
and superintended the Bengal Forest Department 1864; left an incomplete 
work on the Indian Flora. 
2 In November 1862 Hooker received a letter from Gustav Mann, the Kew 
collector at Fernando Po, saying that he had been across the country described 
by this traveller, and that his accounts were all unreal. Mann himself suffered 
under another 'lion' of the Geographical Society. This was Sir Richard 
Burton, Orientalist and traveller, who. Hooker tells Darwin, ' has in a public 
despatch, filched away all poor Mann's credit for the ascent of the Cameroons, 
calls it his expedition, planned and carried out by him, and calls Mann his 
volunteer associate. I never read anything so gross in my life. Poor Mann 
had set his heart on the thing for 2 years, had failed the linst time, and was 
actually leaving Fernando Po for the ascent, when Burton arrived at F. Po 
as Consul, did leave and had ascended the Mt. several weeks before Burton, 
following him, was at its foot ; having prepared the way and provided guides 
and everything. I am quite disgusted, but hardl}- know how to act. I dislike 
and despise the Geogr. Soc. way of going on so much, that I do not like to 
bring the matter forward there, and as to having a quarrel with Burton, wc all 
know what it is to touch pitch.' 
