416 SCIENCE ORGANISATION : SOCIETIES, ETC. 
distinction and the claim of each branch of science for recogni- 
tion in its turn, between rewarding the man who had arrived 
and encouraging the man who was working his way up. 
Official recognition of this kind was very different from 
a worker's acknowledgment of his predecessors' labours ; 
that was a proper recognition to receive, and indeed mere 
honesty to give. Personally, he was quite unconcerned if he 
found, on occasion, that certain continental botanists ignored 
the prior work of himself or his English friends, though he 
condemned such lack of frankness. 'I always feel,' he tells 
Asa Gray plarch 29, 1857), ' that we must so often unintention- 
ally ignore one another's observations, that we can ill afford 
to make the least of those we do know of.' The only thing 
that struck fire from him was neglect of his father's merits 
or the discourtesy of failing to acknowledge his abundant 
generosity. 
The first of the letters that follow on the award of a Eoyal 
medal is in reply to a letter from Huxley, which is given in 
the ' Life of T. H. Huxley,' vol. i, chap. 8, under date of 
November 6, together with a response as generous as Hooker's 
from Edward Forbes. Huxley, who was on the Eoyal Society 
Council, explained to each of them, his close friends, why he 
could not vote for one to the exclusion of the other, and there- 
fore voted for both ! 
November 7, 1854. 
My dear Huxley, — I am very much obliged for your 
kind note although quite uncalled for either as apologetic 
or explanatory, for I fully appreciated and approved your 
sfrings of action. I quite enjoyed having a competition 
and should have been very sorry for the sake of science 
and my own that no one else had been proposed. Of com'se 
I do not in any way look upon my claims and Forbes's as 
coming into competition, but do upon the claims of Botany 
and my etceteras and Palaeontology and Forbes's etceteras 
as having come into direct competition. There has been 
but one honour given to Botany by the R.S., that is the 
Copley medal to Brown, whereas Zoologists, Palaeontologists 
and Geologists galore have been honom'ed over and over 
again. I have always thought and still think that both 
