412 SCIENCE OKGANISATION : SOCIETIES, ETC. 
time to revise his editorial work. Indeed, he saw clearly that 
the Kew Journal could not advantageously continue, and with 
the help of old and trusted friends like Bentham and Harvey 
and Asa Gray, persuaded his father to give it up. 
But the Linnean Journal was restricted to working men 
of science. To reach a wider public, to spread the general com- 
prehension of scientific ideas, seemed very important to the 
advanced wing. To this end a scheme was organised, mainly 
through Huxley, whose energy was in touch with the literary 
as well as the scientific world in London. From 1858 onwards 
a fortnightly scientific column was arranged for in the Saturday 
Beview,^ to which Hooker was too busy to contribute, replying 
to Huxley's invitation as follow^s : 
Kew : Wednesday, 1858. 
I have long been under an engagement of honor to 
Lindley's Gardeners' Chronicle, a paper that has acted most 
liberally by me, and for which I have not written a line for 
9 months, and have no present prospect of doing anything 
for, though I really ought and should. Now I cannot bring 
myself to the scratch to do articles (and however simple 
I am well paid even for notices of Botanical Events and 
translations of short foreign announcements) ; how can I 
expect to screw myself up to write pregnant columns (for 
they must be belly fulls) for the Sat. Review ? 
Besides all this, as my non-original- work- duties increase 
here, I proportionately crave to be at original work. I want 
to get up good papers on obscure and difficult Natural Orders, 
and such work is quite inconsistent with reviewing. 
I quite feel the want of such a class of articles as you 
propose and feel my own selfishness in withdrawing ; but I 
doubt if the good effects Avould be at all commensurate with 
the time and labor that we should expend, and I am quite 
sure that both you and I would be much happier without 
such trammels. Further I am confident that the articles 
would in our cases be contributed at the expense of original 
work, and we should thus ' seek in certain ill, uncertain 
good.' 
^ It is amusing to find the Saturday, for all its excellence on the literary 
side, condemned as ' dreadfully sententious and priggish ' and amateurish in its 
politics, whence its sobriquet of Pall Mall Gazette. 
