408 SCIENCE ORGANISATION : SOCIETIES, ETC. 
work well on a mixed Journal, the chances are that others 
would not,' among 'the hundreds of details that belong to 
both, i.e. to neither.' 
References to the subject appear in the letters from 
November 1853. The Linnean had just elected a new president 
in Thomas Bell,^ who held that ofiQce for the next eight years. 
Great things were hoped from his known administrative 
abilit}^ and his keen desire to resuscitate the Society. Hooker 
could recall one meeting in the old rooms in Soho Square when 
only five members were present to support the President and 
Secretary. The list of contributions from British botanists 
during the last ten years compared unfavourably with those 
made to other journals. The Secretary was chronically hard 
up for papers ; not unnaturally, since ' for such advantages 
can the Botanists be expected to sail in such a coal barge, 
where zoology is little better than rats and cockroaches ? * 
The meetings therefore offered small attraction. ' If some- 
thing is not done the Society will certainly fall to pieces.' But 
* I see no prospect of anything being done till you come up, 
and Lindley gets on the Council ! ' (To Bentham, November 
1853.) 
However, one after another the essential reforms were 
carried, despite temporary half-measures interposed by the 
President in order to meet Brown's uncompromising opposi- 
tion to every point of principle and detail, whereupon Hooker 
exclaims, ' Save me from a vacillating man of all others,' but 
confesses afterwards, * He is so good-natured and anxious 
that everything should go square that it is impossible to 
quarrel with him.' At the crucial moment, however, the 
President backed up the reformers, pacified Brown, and finally, 
with a rich man's liberality, guaranteed that the free distribu- 
tion of the new Journal to all Fellows should have a fair trial, 
1 Thomas Bell (1792-1860) was distinguished as a dental surgeon and a 
zoologist. At Guy's Hospital he was for long the only good surgeon who 
applied scientific sur^^ery to diseases of the teeth. He was most widely known 
for his popular Histories of British Quadrupeds, of British Reptiles, and British 
ytalk-eyed Crustaceae, as well as his edition of White's Selborne, a place where 
he spent his old age, having bought White's house. The Wakes. As Secretary 
of the Royal Society (1848-53), and as President of the Linnean Society 
(1853-61) he did excellent administrative work. 
