Springtime and Other Essays

by Sir Francis Darwin

Historical.

Some plant-names take us back to historical personages. The Carline thistle is named after Karl the Great, better known as Charlemagne. There was a pestilence in his army, and in answer to his prayer an angel appeared and shot, from a crossbow, a bolt, which fell on the Carline thistle with which the Emperor proceeded to conquer the pestilence.

Another magical arrow-shot is described in well-known lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act ii., scene I). Oberon speaks of Cupid loosing his “love shaft smartly from the bow” at “a fair vestal throned in the west.” Cupid missed his mark, and the poet continues:—

“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.”

The name Love-in-idleness should be Love-in-idle if the metre could have allowed it. This means love-in-vain: witness the Anglo-Saxon bible, where occurs

the phrase to take God’s name “in idle.” The flower referred to by Shakespeare is doubtless the pansy.

Some names recall the work of more modern people. Thus the wild chamomile was known in the Eastern counties as Mawther; and this, as all lovers of Dickens will remember, means not a mother but a girl; and the name is in fact a translation of the Greek Parthenion into the Suffolk dialect.

The elder used to be known as the bour-tree. I fear that the name is extinct in England, but a Scotch friend tells me that he was familiar with it in his youth. I love this name because it is associated in my mind with the words of Meg Merrilees [106] in Guy Mannering, the first English classic in which I took pleasure.

“Aye, on this very spot the man fell from his horse—I was behind the bour-tree bush at the very moment. Sair, sair he strove, and sair he cried for mercy; but he was in the hands of them that never kenn’d the word!”

The actual origin of the name is, however, not romantic; it is said to mean bore, and to refer to the fact that tubes were made from it by boring out the pith. It seems possible that such tubes were, in primitive times, used to blow the fire, and this would explain the name elder, which seems to mean kindler.

The dwarf elder, a distinct species, though not connected with an individual, commemorates a race,

being known as Dane’s blood. It grows on the Bartlow Hills, near Cambridge, where tradition says that Danes were killed in battle.

I add a few names as being picturesque, though without any literary associations.

There is an old name for the shepherd’s purse, viz., clapperde-pouch, which is said to allude to the leper who stood at the cross-ways announcing his presence with a bell and clapper, and begged for pennies to put in his pouch, which is typified by the seed capsule. Another name for the plant is mother’s heart, [107] and is no doubt referable to the shape of the seed pod. Children in England, also in Germany and Switzerland, used to play at the simple game of asking a companion to gather a pod, and then jeering at him for having plucked out his mother’s heart.

The name columbine comes from the flower’s obvious resemblance to a group of doves, and its Latin name aquilegia, meaning a collection of eagles, is a nobler form of the same idea.

Dead-man’s fingers is a fine uncanny name for the innocent Orchis maculata, and refers to its branching white tuber.

Garlick is a very ancient name, being derived from the Anglo-Saxon gar, a spear, and leac, a plant; in the name house-leek the word still bears its original meaning of a plant.

Tragopogon, the goat’s beard, which closes its flowers about mid-day, was once known as go-to-bed-at-noon.

The pansy has been called Herb trinity from the triple colouring of its petals. In Welsh, and also in German, the pansy is called stepmother. The lower petal is the most decorative, and this is the stepmother herself. On examining the back of the flower it will be seen that she is supported by two green leaflets, known as the sepals. These are called her two chairs. Then come her two daughters, less smart, and having only a chair apiece. Lastly, the two step-daughters, still more plainly dressed and with but one chair between them.

Polemonium, from its numerous leaflets arranged in pairs, has received the picturesque name of Jacob’s ladder. I remember the pleasure with which I first saw it growing wild in the hayfields of the Engadine.

Polygonatum, i.e. Solomon’s seal, has been christened Scala cœli, the ladder to heaven, on the same principle. The name Solomon’s seal is not obviously appropriate till we dig up the plant, when the underground stem is found marked with curious scars, which, however, should be pentagonal if they are to represent Solomon’s pentacle.

Herb twopence (Lysimchia nummularia) is so named after the round leaflets arranged in pairs along its creeping stalk. I do not know why Inula conyza is called ploughman’s spikenard, but it is a picturesque name.

Everyone knows the garden plant touch-me-not, so called from the curious irritability of its pods, which writhe in an uncanny way when we gather them. This quality is expressed twice over in the Latin name Impatiens noli-me-tangere. But there is a

forgotten old English name which pleases me more, viz., quick-in-the-hand, that is to say alive-in-the-hand. This use of the word survives in the familiar phrase “the quick and the dead.”

The English name of Echium vulgare is viper’s bugloss—this I had always imagined referred to the forked tongue (the style) which projects from the flower. But it is said to be so named from the seeds resembling a viper’s head. This is certainly the case, and what can be the function of the little knobs on the seed, which represent eyes, I cannot imagine. The name bugloss is derived from the Greek and means ox-tongue—no doubt in reference to the plant’s rough leaves.

Corruptions.—Another and greater class of names comprises those which are corruptions of classical names or of those unfamiliar in other ways.

A well-known example is daffodil, which was originally affodyl, a corruption of asphodel, a name of unknown meaning, originally given to the iris, and transferred to narcissus. A very obvious corruption is aaron, which has been applied to Lords and Ladies, whose scientific name is Arum. An incomprehensibly foolish instance is bullrush for pool-rush, i.e. water rush. This name has at least the merit of supplying material for that riddle of our childhood in which occur the words “when the bull rushes out.”

Carraway is another obvious corruption of its Latin name Carum carui. In the ancient Schola Salernitana, as I learn from Sir Norman Moore, is a punning Latin line, “Dum carui carwey non sine

febre fui” (“When I was out of carraway I was never free from fever”).

Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea) was originally dagwood, so called because it was used to make dags or skewers: doubtless the same word as dagger. According to a Welsh tradition dogwood was the tree on which the devil hung his mother. I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting this fact, although it does not bear on anything in particular.

Eglantine, a name used for the wild rose, is with much probability derived from the Latin aculentus, prickly, which became in French aiglent. Hence came the French names of the plant eglantier and our eglantine.

Gooseberry is believed not to have anything to do with a goose, but to come from the Flemish Kroes, meaning a cross, a comparison said to be suggested by the triple thorns, though of course a fourth thorn is needed to make this simile accurate. It is hard to see why a plant which grows wild in England, and seems by some botanists to be considered indigenous, should have a Flemish name. Prior, our chief authority, asserts that the early herbalists constantly took names from continental writers, and I think his judgment may be trusted. The problem of the derivation of the word gooseberry may at least serve to illustrate the difficulty of the subject.

The name Hemlock, which nowadays has a wicked poisonous sound, has in truth a very innocent origin. It is compounded of hem, i.e. haulm, a stalk, and lock, or leac, a plant, thus signifying merely a plant with a stem. Jack of the Buttery, a name applied to

Sedum acre, is said to be a corruption from bot, i.e. an internal parasite, and theriac, by which was meant a cure for that evil. The last-named word has turned into “Jack,” and bot has grown into “buttery.”

Lamb’s tongue is said to be a name for Plantago media; but this must, I think, be a corruption of land tongue, which is highly appropriate to the tongue-like leaves lying so closely appressed to the soil that no blade of grass grows under them, as though they were determined to spite any one who should root them up by disfiguring his lawn with naked patches. But still better evidence is forthcoming in the fact that my old Cambridgeshire gardener always called them land tongues. Why the Anglo-Saxons used the name way bread for the plantain I do not see: the fact is vouched for by Cockayne in his book entitled Leechdoms.

In Gloucestershire the plantain is called the fire-leaf, a name which records the belief that plantains are a danger in the way of heating hay-stacks.

The word madder, i.e. the name of the plant which supplies the red dye for the trousers of our French allies, has a curious history. Madder is derived from mad, a worm, and should therefore be applied to cochineal, the red colouring matter produced by the minute creature called a coccus. But still more confusion meets us: the word vermilion which is now used for a red colour of mineral origin, is derived from vermis, a worm, and should therefore also be applied to cochineal. The word pink, one of the most familiar of plant-names, has a curious origin, being simply the German

Pfingst, a corruption of Pentecost, i.e. the fiftieth day after Easter.

The tendency to make some kind of sense, or at least something familiar, from the unfamiliar, comes out in name service-tree (Pyrus torminalis). It has nothing to do with service, being simply a corruption of cerevisia, a fermented liquor. The fruit was used for brewing what Evelyn in his Sylva, chap. xv., declares it to be, an incomparable drink. Prior says that the French name of the tree, cormier, is derived from an ancient Gaulish word courmi, which seems to suggest the modern Welsh cwrw, beer.

Tansy (Tanacetum) is believed to be simply a corruption of athansia, immortality. I gather that we got the name through the French athanasie, in which, of course, the th is sounded as a t. In all probability it was originally applied to some plant more deserving of being credited with immortality.

A few miscellaneous names may here be given. Thorough wax is a name for Chlora perfoliata, also known as yellow wort. Its leaves are perfoliate, i.e. opposite and united by their bases so that the stem seems to have grown through a single leaf.

Kemps, i.e. warriors, was a name of the common plantain, with which children used to fight one against the other. I remember this as being an unsatisfactory game because one so constantly killed one’s own kemp instead of the enemy.

Herb Paris is simply the plant with a pair of leaves; it should, however, have been described as having four leaves. Thus the name has nothing to

do with Paris, the capital of France. But some plants have names of geographical origin; the currants or minute grapes used for making cakes are so called because they come from Corinth. So that we are quite wrong in applying this same name to the familiar companion of the gooseberry in our gardens. In the same way damsons are so called because they are said to have come originally from Damascus.

The name Canterbury bell has a very interesting origin, namely, that bells were the recognised badge of pilgrims to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. One of these bells was found in the bed of the Thames when old London Bridge was pulled down. It is said to be “about the size of an ordinary handbell, with a flat top, on which is an open handle, through which a strap could easily be passed to attach it to a horse’s collar.” This bell is known to have been associated with Canterbury by the inscription Campana Thome on the outer edge. The pilgrims seem to have journeyed cheerfully. It is written that some “pilgrims will have with them bag-pipes; so that in everie towne they come through, what with the noise of their piping, and the jangling of their Canterburie bells, etc., they make more noise than if the king came there away.”

Dutch mice is a name for Lathyrus tuberosus. Gerard says that the plant is so named from the “similitude or likeness of Domesticall Mise, which the blacke, rounde, and long nuts, with a peece of the slender string hanging out behind do represent.” From this description one would expect to see

mouse-like pods, but it is the tubers which give the name to the plant. This is clearly visible in Bentham’s illustration; [114] I hope the artist was unaware of the name when he made the drawing—but I have my doubts. The specimen from Cambridgeshire (which I owe to the kindness of Mr Shrubbs of the University Herbarium) are not especially mouse-like.

The names shepherd’s needle and Venus’ comb have been given to an umbelliferous plant, Scandix Pecten. The teeth of the comb are represented by what are practically seeds. These are elongated stick-like objects covered with minute prickles all pointing upwards. I do not know how the seeds germinate under ordinary conditions, but I learn from Mr Shrubbs that they are dragged into the holes of earthworms, as my father describes in the case of sticks and leaf-stalks. Unfortunately for the worms, the prickles on Venus’ needles do not allow the creatures to free themselves, and they actually die in considerable numbers with the needles fixed in their gullets.

SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER [115a]

“Few, if indeed any, have ever known plants as he did.”

—Bower.

Joseph Dalton Hooker was born in 1817 and died in 1911; and of these ninety-four years eighty-one included botanical work, for at thirteen “Joseph” was “becoming a zealous botanist”; and Mr L. Huxley records (ii., 480) that he kept at work till a little before his death on 10th December 1911, and that although his physical strength began to fail in August, yet “till the end he was keenly interested in current topics and the latest contribution to natural science.” So far as actual research is concerned, it is remarkable that he should have continued to work at the Balsams—a very difficult class of plants—at least till 1910. Mr Huxley has wisely determined to make his book of a reasonable size, and the task of compressing his gigantic mass of material into two volumes must have been a difficult one. He has been thoroughly successful, [115b] and no aspect of Sir

Joseph’s life is neglected, the whole being admirably arranged and annotated, and treated throughout with conspicuous judgment and skill.

In an “autobiographical fragment” (i., p. 3) Sir Joseph records that he was born at Halesworth in Suffolk, “being the second child of William Jackson Hooker and Maria Turner.” He was not only the son of an eminent botanist, but fate went so far as to give him a botanical godfather in the person of Rev. J. Dalton, “a student of carices and mosses and discoverer of Scheuchzeria in England.” It was after Mr Dalton that Hooker was named, his first name, Joseph, commemorating his grandfather Hooker. In 1821 the family moved to Glasgow, where Sir William Hooker was appointed Professor of Botany. It was here that Sir Joseph, at the age of five or six, showed his innate love of plants, for he records [116]:—

“When I was still in petticoats, I was found grubbing in a wall in the dirty suburbs of the dirty city of Glasgow, and . . . when asked what I was about, I cried out that I had found Bryum argenteum (which it was not), a very pretty little moss which I had seen in my father’s collection, and to which I had taken a great fancy.”

While still a child his father used to take him on excursions in the Highlands, and on one occasion, on returning home, Joseph built up a heap of stones to represent a mountain and “stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected on it, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany.”

Sir Joseph records that his father gave him a scrap of a moss gathered by Mungo Park when almost at the point of death. It excited in him a desire of entering Africa by Morocco, and crossing the greater Atlas. That childish dream, he says, “I never lost; I nursed it till, half a century afterwards, . . . I did (with my friend Mr Ball, who is here by me, and another friend Mr G. Maw) ascend to the summit of the previously unconquered Atlas.”

In 1820 William Hooker was appointed to the newly founded Professorship of Botany at Glasgow. Of this his son Joseph writes, “It was a bold venture for my father to undertake so responsible an office, for he had never lectured, or even attended a course of lectures.” With wonderful energy he “published in time for use in his second course, the Flora Scotica in two volumes.” Sir Joseph’s mother was Maria, daughter of Dawson Turner, banker, botanist and archæologist, so that science was provided on both sides of the pedigree.

It would seem that Sir Joseph’s mother was somewhat of a martinet. When Joseph came in from school he had to present himself to her, and “was not allowed to sit down in her presence without permission.”

In 1832, Joseph, then fifteen years of age, entered Glasgow University, being already, in the words of his father, “a fair British botanist” with “a tolerable herbarium very much of his own collecting”; he adds, “Had he time for it, he would already be more useful to me than Mr Klotzsch” [his assistant].

It was in 1838 that Hooker got his opportunity,

for it chanced that James Clerk Ross, the Arctic explorer, was in 1838 visiting at the Smiths of Jordan Hill. In order that Joseph might meet Ross, both he and his father were invited to breakfast. The meeting ended in Ross promising to take him as surgeon and naturalist. There seems to have been a little innocent jobbery with folks in high places, and it fortunately turned out that the expedition was delayed so that Joseph had the opportunity of spending some time at Haslar Hospital.

The expedition seems to have been fitted out with astonishing poverty. Seventy years later he wrote, “Except some drying paper for plants, I had not a single instrument or book supplied to me as a naturalist—all were given to me by my father. I had, however, the use of Ross’s library, and you may hardly credit it, but it is fact that not a single glass bottle was supplied for collecting purposes; empty pickle bottles were all we had, and rum as a preservative from the ship’s stores.”

It is interesting to find Ross, in his preliminary talk with Hooker, saying that he wanted a trained naturalist, “such a person as Mr Darwin”—to which Hooker aptly retorted by asking what Mr Darwin was before he went out.

I imagine that Hooker was lucky in being taken on Ross’s voyage as a naturalist, since the primary object of the expedition was to fill up “the wide blanks in the knowledge of terrestrial magnetism in the southern hemisphere.”

It seems like a forecast of what was to be the chief friendship of his life, that Darwin’s

Naturalist’s Voyage should have been one of the books that inspired him to join in the voyage of the Erebus and Terror. Hooker “slept with the proofs under his pillow, and devoured them eagerly the moment he woke in the morning.” Much earlier he had been stirred by Cook’s voyages, and, like Darwin, was fired by Humboldt’s Personal Narrative. While at sea his work was largely zoological, and the tow-net was kept busy. But on 24th August 1841, he writes to his father of his great wish to devote himself “to collecting plants and studying them . . . but we are comparatively seldom off the sea, and then in the most unpropitious seasons for travelling or collecting.” He speaks, too, of his wish to see the end of the voyage, in order that he might devote himself to botany.

The voyage had its dangers: in March 1842, during a storm, the Terror collided with the Erebus, and for nearly ten minutes the interlocked ships drifted towards a huge berg: the Erebus remained rolling and striking her masts against the berg, but managed by the “desperate expedient” of “sailing stern first down wind” to escape destruction.

Hooker writes to his father, 25th November 1842: “The Barrier, the bergs several hundred feet high and 1–6 miles long, and the Mts. of the great Antarctic continent, are too grand to be imagined, and almost too stupendous to be carried in the memory.”

In a letter to his mother he describes seeing at Cape Horn “a little cairn of stones raised by the officers of the Beagle.” And again he writes, “Clouds

and fogs, rain and snow justified all Darwin’s accurate descriptions of a dreary Fuegian summer.” He speaks of Darwin’s Naturalist’s Voyage as “not only indispensable but a delightful companion and guide.” There is plenty of interesting matter in the account of Hooker’s voyage, but the above fragments of detail must here suffice. The Erebus and Terror reached Woolwich on 7th September 1843.

Having safely returned to England, the next problem was what was to be Hooker’s permanent occupation. Nothing, however, was fixed on, and in the meantime he fulfilled “his intention of seeing the chief Continental botanists, and comparing their gardens and collections with those of Kew.”

His first visit was to Humboldt, at Paris, who turned out “a punchy little German,” whereas he had expected “a fine fellow 6 feet without his boots.” Of the great man he says, “He certainly is still a most wonderful man, with a sagacity and memory and capability for generalising that are quite marvellous. I gave him my book [Flora Antarctica], which delighted him much; he read through the first three numbers, and I suppose noted down thirty or forty things which he asked me particulars about.” Humboldt was then seventy-six years of age. Hooker’s impression of the Paris botanists was not favourable; he speaks of their habit of telling him of the magnitude of their own researches, “while of those of their neighbours they seem to know very little indeed.” Of Decaisne, however, he speaks with warm appreciation. He would have been surprised if a prophet

had told him that he was to be instrumental in bringing out an English version of Decaisne’s well-known book.

In 1845 Hooker acted as a deputy for Graham, the Professor of Botany at Edinburgh. In May he wrote to his father, “I am lecturing away like a house on fire. I was not in the funk I expected, though I had every reason to be in a far greater one.” Finally, when Graham died, Balfour, the father of the present holder of the office, was elected professor, and Hooker was fortunately freed from a post that would have been a fatal tie to his career.

But happier events followed; he became engaged to Frances, daughter of Professor Henslow. Sir William spoke of the affair with a certain pomposity: “I believe Miss Henslow to be an amiable and well-educated person of most respectable though not high connections, and from all that I have seen of her, well suited to Joseph’s habits and pursuits.” Their engagement was a long one, and their marriage could not take place till after his Indian journey, which was the next event of importance in his career.

On the voyage out, he was fortunate in becoming known to Lord Dalhousie, and the friendship built up in the course of the journey and afterwards in India “showed itself in unstinted support of Hooker.” It was, however, “a personal appreciation of the man rather than of the scientific investigator.” Indeed, Lord Dalhousie, “a perfect specimen of the miserable system of education pursued at Oxford,” had a “lamentably low opinion” of science.

At Darjiling began Hooker’s “lifelong friendship

with a very remarkable character, Brian Hodgson,” [122a] administrator and scholar, who had “won equal fame as Resident at the court of Nepal and as a student of Oriental lore.” Mr L. Huxley points out that “if the friendship with Lord Dalhousie provided the key that opened official barriers and made Hooker’s journeyings possible, the friendship with Hodgson more than anything else made them a practical success.”

I shall not attempt to follow Hooker through his wanderings—only a few scattered references to them are possible. It is pleasant to read that when Mr Elwes visited Sikkim twenty-two years after Hooker, he found that the Lepchas almost worshipped him, and he was remembered as a learned Hakim, an incarnation of wisdom and strength.

The most exciting adventure of Hooker and his fellow-traveller was their imprisonment in Sikkim, where their lives were clearly in danger, and they were only released when “troops were hurried up to Darjiling” and “an ultimatum dispatched to the Rajah.” [122b]

For the rest of his botanical journeyings he had the companionship of Thomson, who had been his fellow-student, and, like himself, was the son of a Glasgow professor. A letter to his father (undated) gives an idea of the wonderful success of his Indian travels: “It is easy to talk of a Flora Indica, and Thomson and I do talk of it, to imbecility! But

suppose that we even adopted the size, quality of paper, brevity of description, etc., which characterise De Candolle’s Prodromus, and we should, even under these conditions, fill twelve such volumes at least.”

The usual shabbiness [123] of governments towards science is well illustrated (p. 344) in the case of Hooker:—“His total expenditure was £2200; the official allowances were £1200: the remainder was contributed from his own and his father’s purse.”

In 1855 Joseph began his official life at Kew on being appointed assistant to his father. And ten years later, on Sir William’s death, he succeeded as a matter of course to the Directorship.

Shortly before this, i.e. in 1854, he was the recipient of an honour greatly coveted by men of science, namely the award of the Royal Medal. He is characteristically pleased for the sake of the science of Botany rather than for himself, and refers to the neglect that botany has generally experienced at the hands of the Society in comparison with zoological subjects. His own success

characteristically reminds him of what he considered a slight to his father, viz., that he had not received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. This, the highest honour which men of science can aspire to, is open not merely to Britons but to all the world, and I should doubt whether Sir William had ever been high in the list of possible recipients.

We are now approaching the great change wrought in the scientific outlook of the world by the Origin of Species. In November 1856, after reading Darwin’s MS. on geographical distribution, Hooker wrote that though “never very stubborn about unalterability of specific type, I never felt so shaky about species before.” It must be remembered that throughout the companionship of Hooker and Darwin the latter was a convinced evolutionist. He writes in his autobiography that in 1838, after reading Malthus on Population, he was convinced of the origin of new species by means of natural selection. Throughout the close intercourse which subsisted for so many years between Hooker and Darwin, in which the views afterwards put forth in the Origin of Species were discussed, Hooker seems not to have been a convinced evolutionist. His conversion dates apparently from 1858, when the papers by Darwin and Wallace were read at the Linnean Society. This has always appeared to me remarkable, and T. H. Huxley [124] has said with regard to his own position:—“My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the

‘Origin’ was, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’”

After the publication of the Origin of Species Hooker wrote to Darwin, [125] “I have not yet got half through the book, not from want of will, but of time—for it is the very hardest book to read, to full profit, that I ever tried—it is so cram-full of matter and reasoning. . . . Somehow it reads very different from the MS., and I often fancy that I must have been very stupid not to have more fully followed it in MS.”

Whatever Hooker may have been he was not stupid, and though nowadays it is easy to feel surprise that his long-continued familiarity with Darwin’s work had not earlier convinced him of the doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection, we must ascribe it rather to his early education in the sacrosanct meaning of the word species.

I think it must have been roughly about the time of the publication of the Origin of Species that my earliest memories of Sir Joseph Hooker refer. I clearly remember his eating gooseberries with us as children, in the kitchen garden at Down. The love of gooseberries was a bond between us which had no existence in the case of our uncles, who either ate no gooseberries or preferred to do so in solitude. By a process of evolutionary change the word gooseberry took on a new meaning at Down. Hooker used to send Darwin some especially fine bananas grown in the Kew hothouses, and these were called Kew gooseberries. It was characteristic

of my father to feel doubts as to whether he ought to receive Royal bananas from a Royal garden. I wish I could remember Hooker romping with us as children, of which he somewhere speaks.

It was about this time that Darwin had a fancy to make out the names of the English grasses, and Hooker wrote, “How on earth you have made out 30 grasses rightly is a mystery to me. You must have a marvellous tact for appreciating diagnosis.” It was at this time that one of Darwin’s boys remarked in regard to a grass he had found:—“I are an extraordinary grass-finder, and must have it particularly by me all dinner.” Strange to say he did not grow into a botanist.

Hooker’s letters at this time impress me with the difficulty he met with in adapting his systematic work to the doctrines of evolution. He gives the impression of working at species in a puzzled or discontented frame of mind. Thus on 1st January 1859, he writes to a fellow-botanist:—“What I shall try to do is, to harmonise the facts with the newest doctrines, not because they are the truest, but because they do give you room to reason and reflect at present, and hopes for the future, whereas the old stick-in-the-mud doctrines of absolute creations, multiple creations, and dispersion by actual causes under existing circumstances, are all used up, they are so many stops to further enquiry.”

A few days later he continues to the same correspondent: “If the course of migration does not agree with that of birds, winds, currents, etc., so much the worse for the facts of migration!” On

the whole it seems to me a remarkable fact that Hooker’s conversion to evolution was such a slow affair. As Mr Huxley points out, “The partial light thrown on the question in fragmentary discussions was not enough, and until 1858–59, after the consolidation of Darwin’s arguments in the famous Abstract [The Origin of Species], Hooker . . . worked avowedly on the accepted lines of the fixity of species, for which he had so far found no convincing substitute.”

It is pleasant to read Darwin’s warm-hearted words: [127a] “You may say what you like, but you will never convince me that I do not owe you ten times as much as you can owe me” (30th Dec. 1858).

Hooker’s importance in the world was ever on the increase, and this had also its usual concomitant drawbacks. Huxley wrote to him [127b] on 19th December 1860: “It is no use having any false modesty about the matter. You and I, if we last ten years longer—and you by a long while first—will be representatives of our respective lines in the country. In that capacity we shall have certain duties to perform, to ourselves, to the outside world, and to Science. We shall have to swallow praise, which is no great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous bastings and irritations.” And this was doubtless a true prophecy for both the friends.

Hooker’s work—both his botanical research and duties of a more public character—was ever on the increase.

In the first category comes the Genera Plantarum, a gigantic piece of work begun with the co-operation

of Bentham in the ’60’s, and continued until 1883. The aim of this celebrated publication was no less than to give a revised definition of every genus of flowering plants. If this had been the only publication by the two friends, it had been enough to found a high and permanent place in the botanical world. But as far as Hooker was concerned, it may almost be said to have been carried out in his spare moments. It should be remembered that for part of this period he was aided in the management of the Gardens by Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, who began as Hooker’s Private Secretary and was then made Assistant Director. [128a]

The Presidency of the Royal Society, which Hooker held 1873–78, was clearly a great strain, but he carried out the work (which is in fact that of a ministry of science) with conspicuous success.

In January 1873 he wrote to Darwin:—“I quite agree as to the awful honour of P. R. S. . . . but, my dear fellow, I don’t want to be crowned head of science. I dread it—‘Uneasy is the head, etc.’—and my beloved Gen. Plant. will be grievously impeded.” It gives some idea of the strain of his work as a whole when we find him writing [128b] to Darwin (Jan. 14, 1875): “I have 15 Committees of the R[oyal] S[ociety] to attend to. I cannot tell you what a relief they are to me—matters are so ably and quietly conducted by Stokes, Huxley, and Spottiswoode that to me they are of the same sort of relaxation that metaphysics are to Huxley.”

He speaks, [128c] too (1874), of the annual conversazione

as “a tremendous affair. . . . How I did pity the President of the United States.” I am reminded of an American caricature of the President of the United States with red, swollen fingers, inscribed:—“The hand we have shaken so often.” With regard to other honours, he declined at once the K.C.M.G.; he then began to dread a K.C.B.; finally he was trapped into the K.C.S.I., an honour which most men would desire quite as much as Hooker longed to decline it.

In 1873 Hooker made a series of experiments on the digestion and absorption of food by certain insectivorous plants, notably Nepenthes, with the object of helping Darwin in his work on that subject.

We must return a year or two to deal with a matter which, as Mr L. Huxley remarks, “ravaged and embittered” the period 1870–72—namely, his conflict with Ayrton, the First Commissioner of Works in Gladstone’s Government. Mr L. Huxley, like a clever musician, gives a touch of Ayrton’s tone in the opening phrases of his composition. At a grand festivity in honour of the Shah of Persia this sovereign was unaccountably anxious to meet the Commissioner of Works. Ayrton was at supper, and bluntly responded, with his mouth full of chicken, “I’ll see the old nigger in Jericho first!”

He began to show his quality by sending an “official reprimand to the Director of Kew.” This, the first received in twenty-nine years’ service, was based “on a misapprehension.” Ayrton’s aim seems to have been to compel Hooker to resign and convert Kew Gardens into a public park.

In 1871 Hooker casually discovered from a subordinate “that he himself had been superseded . . . in one of his most important duties—namely, the heating of the plant-houses.” It would take too long to enumerate the endless acts of insolence and folly which marked Ayrton’s treatment of Hooker. A full statement of the case was drawn up and signed by a small body of the most distinguished scientific men of the day, and after a debate in the House of Commons, Mr Ayrton was kicked upstairs “from the Board of Works to the resuscitated office of Judge Advocate General.” I remember an anecdote which illustrates Ayrton’s stupendous ignorance of the great department over which he was called to rule. Hooker was taking Ayrton round the Gardens when they met Mr Bentham, who happened to remark that he had come from the Herbarium. “Oh,” said Ayrton, “did you get your feet wet?” For the official ruler of Kew there was no difference between a Herbarium and an Aquarium.

This period has pleasanter memories, for it was in 1873 that Huxley, much out of health and “heavily mulcted” by having to pay the costs of an unsuccessful action brought against him by a man of straw, was persuaded to accept from a group of personal friends a sum of £3000 to clear his financial position, Hooker wrote to Darwin, “I am charmed by Huxley’s noble-minded letter.”

In 1874 Mrs Hooker died, leaving six children, of whom three still required care. Hooker wrote later to Darwin from Nuneham (ii., p. 191): “I am here on two days’ visit to a place I had not seen

since I was here with Fanny Henslow [Mrs Hooker] in 1847. I cannot tell you how depressed I feel at times. She, you, and Oxford are burnt into my memory.” Here occurs, in a letter from Mrs Bewicke, some account of Hooker’s method of dealing with his family. She gives the impression (though clearly not intentionally) that Hooker rather worried his children. She speaks of the many questions he asked them at meals and the pleasure he took in their success in answering. She adds, “When we drove into London with him, he would tell us the names of the big houses and their owners, and then expect us to know them as we drove back.” This confirms my impression that Hooker was not quite judicious in his manner of educating or enlightening his children. I have a general impression of having sympathised with them in their difficulties.

In 1876, Hooker was happily married to Hyacinth, widow of Sir William Jardine; and about the same time Sir William Thiselton-Dyer married Sir Joseph’s daughter.

The Index Kewensis, which unites the names of two friends, was carried out at Kew, with funds supplied by Darwin. It was in fact a completion of Steudel’s Nomenclator, and was published in four quarto volumes in 1892–95. The MS. is said to have weighed more than a ton and comprised about 375,000 entries. Hooker, with wonderful energy and devotion, read and criticised it in detail. [131]

In 1885, Hooker resigned his position as Director at Kew, and henceforward lived at the Camp, Sunningdale, his “Tusculum” among the pine-woods as Mr Huxley puts it, where he remained, ever hard at work, for twenty-six years.

He was still astonishingly vigorous; at eighty-two he was “younger than ever,” though at ninety-three he confessed to being lazy in his old age.

In 1885 and subsequent years he was, as I gratefully remember, employed in helping me in the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. I could not have had a kinder or wiser collaborator.

Hooker’s unaffected modesty came out again about this period. In 1887 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, an honour which is the pinnacle of scientific ambition, and is open to foreigners as well as British subjects. He wrote in regard to the award, “I never once thought of myself as within the pale of it.” And in a letter to W. E. Darwin, “The success of my after-dinner homily at the R. S. is to me far more wonderful than getting the Copley. You . . . can guess my condition of two days’ nausea before the dinner, and 2 days of illness after it. I am not speaking figuratively.”

We find Hooker here and there slashing at contemporary methods of education. For instance, in regard to the mass of public school boys: “Not one of them can now translate a simple paper in

Latin or Greek, or will look into a classical author, or listen to the talk about one.” Mathematicians fared no better. He wrote in 1893:—“What you say of A, B, and C does not surprise me. They are ne plus ultra mathematicians, and have not a conception of biological science, and in fact are only half-intellects (I suppose I deserve to be burned).”

It is pleasant to find that Hooker allowed himself time to indulge his love of art. He was especially fond of old Wedgwood ware, and corresponded with William Darwin—a fellow amateur. In 1895, he allowed the same friend to become the owner of some old Wedgwood ware; and when the sale was completed Hooker speaks of its being a relief “to feel that the crockery is going back where it should have gone by rights.” [133] Elsewhere (ii., p. 360) Hooker discourses pleasantly on the perfect adaption to its end of the old Wedgwood ware. An old teapot, for instance, avoids all the faults of the modern article, in lifting which “you scald your knuckles against the body of the pot”; then the lid shoots off and you scald your other hand in trying to save it; the tea shoots out and splashes over the teacup; lastly the “spout dribbles when you set the pot down.” All these sins are provided against in the old Wedgwood teapot.

The Flora of British India having been finished, he was asked to complete the handbook to the Flora of Ceylon, interrupted by the death of Trimen, and this occupied him for three years. He was then led to what was to be his final piece of work, namely, a

study of the difficult group of the Balsams (Impatiens), and he certainly was not coloured by what he worked in, for the whole stock of his admirable patience was needed for this difficult research. His perseverance was a by-product of his noble enthusiasm. In 1906, when he was eighty-nine years of age, he writes enthusiastically to a friend in the East expressing his longing for more Balsams, and concluding, “I do love Indian Botany.” And in 1909 he hears that the Paris Herbarium had overlooked forty sheets of Indo-Chinese specimens—and writes, “This is like a stroke of paralysis to a man approaching his ninety-third year, but it is no use grumbling, my eyes are as good as ever, and my fingers are as agile as ever, and I am indeed thankful.”

The Life of Hooker is enriched by a striking essay from the pen of Professor Bower. He points out (ii., p. 412) that “few, if indeed any, have ever known plants as he did. Such knowledge comes only from growing up with them from earliest childhood.” Professor Bower adds that Hooker “shared with Darwin that wider outlook upon the field of Science that gave a special value to the writings of both”; and he adds, “The Himalayan Journals ranks with Darwin’s Voyage of the ‘Beagle’.”

When More Letters of Charles Darwin was in preparation, Hooker was appealed to for assistance, and wrote a characteristically kind letter (1st Feb. 1899) to one of the editors:—

“I will gladly help you all I can; so have no scruples. . . . You are right to make the book uncompromisingly scientific. It will be greatly valued.

I am getting so old and oblivious that I fear I may not be of much use.”

And a few weeks later (24th Feb. 1899):—

“I had no idea that your father had kept my letters. Your account of 742 pp. of them is a revelation. I do enjoy re-reading your father’s; as to my own, I regard it as a punishment for my various sins of blindness, perversity, and inattention to his thousand and one facts and hints that I did not profit by as much as I should have, all as revealed by my letters.”

In 1907 he received the Order of Merit, the Insignia being conveyed to him by Colonel Douglas Dawson from the King. I had the honour of being the only person present on the occasion, though why Sir Joseph allowed me this pleasure I cannot guess. I remember Colonel Dawson in vain trying to persuade Sir Joseph not to see him to his carriage at the door. I have, too, a picture of Sir Joseph fidgeting round the room afterwards, unwillingly wearing the collar to please his family.

In 1908 he took the chief part in the fiftieth anniversary of the Darwin-Wallace papers of 1858. He characteristically begged the Darwins to tell him if they entertained “the smallest doubt of the expediency or propriety of telling the public the part” which he took on that historic occasion!

He was also the chief guest at the 1909 celebration at Cambridge of the centenary of Darwin’s birth. I recollect him wandering about at the evening reception, quite unconsciously the object of all eyes. Unfortunately, Hooker was not present

at the banquet, where, as Mr L. Huxley says, “Mr Balfour’s historic speech was only eclipsed by the sense of personal charm in Mr W. E. Darwin’s reminiscences of his father” (ii., p. 467).

It is delightful to find Hooker in 1911 vigorously corresponding with Dr Bruce, a “brother Antarctic.” He writes to Bruce, 20th February 1911, “I return herewith the proof-sheets, which I have perused with extraordinary interest and an amount of instruction and information that I never expected to receive at my age” (Life, ii., p. 478). It is touching that in extreme old age the first work that occupied his youth should still find so clear an echo in his vigorous old age.

Mr Huxley records (ii., p. 480) that though Sir Joseph “kept at work till but a little before the end,” his physical strength began to fail in the late summer; but his mental powers were undimmed. He died in his sleep on 10th December 1911, and was buried (as he had desired) near his father’s grave at Kew.

A GREAT HOSPITAL [137a]

Dr Moore writes in his preface: “The History is a gift from me to St Bartholomew’s, and I hope that the labour of investigating historical events, of meditating upon them, and of finally writing the book in such hours as my profession allowed during more than thirty years, may be taken as a proof of the gratitude I feel to the noble hospital with which my whole professional life has been connected.”

The book seems to me eminently worthy of its subject and of its learned author. [137b] As a record of the 800 years during which the Hospital has existed it naturally contains an enormous mass of detail, and this means that the book is physically very big. The first volume is of 614 quarto pages, and the second of 992 pages. The index contains at least 20,000 entries.

The Hospital and the Priory of St Bartholomew were the first buildings erected on the open space of Smithfield. The foundation took place in 1123, and Rahere, the founder, was the first Prior. He is

said to have been of lowly race, and to have made himself popular in the houses of nobles and princes “by witcisms and flattering talk.” Then he repented of such a mode of life and made a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain forgiveness. On his way back he had a vision of St Bartholomew, by whom he was directed to found a church in Smithfield.

It seems that “no part of the hospital as built by Rahere is now standing, but within the present building, which covers the original site, there still remains one thing which was there in his time. It is a legal document which his eyes beheld, and which was sealed in his presence. This charter is written on vellum in the clear hand-writing of the first half of the twelfth century.” The seal shows a “turreted building, which is probably the Priory of St Bartholomew’s as it looked in the first twenty years of its existence.”

The two parts of an indented chirograph have been preserved in the hospital, which give (i., p. 239) a view of the state of agriculture in Essex in the reign of King John. Mention is made of fields of wheat, rye, barley, oats and beans; of oxen, horses, of brew-house and barn. Rent was paid in kind and sent by water to the hospital quay, which may have been on the River Fleet and therefore nearer to the hospital than a landing-place on the Thames. The Fleet river, as Dr Moore happily points out (i., p. 246), is now shut up in a tubular dungeon, “as if to remind it of all the unhappiness it had passed by in the Gaola de Flete from the time” when the prisoners watched “the ships passing up

it with corn for St Bartholomew’s Hospital . . . to the days when the body of Samuel Pickwick was confided to the custody of the tipstaff, to be by him taken to the Warden of the Fleet Prison, and there detained until the amount of the damages and costs in the action of Bardell against Pickwick was fully paid and satisfied.”

The author never fails to make interesting use of the driest of charters. Thus in the reign of King John a person with the pleasant name of Adam Pepercorn grants to the hospital ten shillings quit-rent for some land in Grub Street, a region full of unhappy memories. Dr Moore quotes passages from Johnson, Swift, and Goldsmith to show that the name Grub Street should have been protected by such associations from any change; but nothing is sacred, and Grub Street is now known as Milton Street.

The author (i., p. 279) asks whether the brethren of St Bartholomew’s made any medical studies, and points out they may well have read parts of the Liber Etymologiarum by St Isidore of Seville, who flourished a.d. 601. The book is a general summary of knowledge in Isidore’s day, and few religious houses in England were without a copy.

I like the facts in the region of domestic economy which are given. For instance, that in 1229 Richard of Muntfichet was ordered by Henry III. to give “six leafless oaks for the hospital fire.” We want to know whether they were the King’s oaks, or was Muntfichet forced to supply the wood? If Dr R. W. Darwin (father of Charles Darwin) had then

been King of England he would have ordered apple-trees, for these he considered much superior to all other fuel. The reader is constantly meeting interesting stories. Thus Bishop Roger Niger was, in the year 1230, celebrating mass in St Paul’s when a great thunderstorm burst over the church and the congregation fled in terror. But Roger and one deacon were not to be frightened, and went on with the Mass.

In the 13th Century John of Marsham (i., p. 390) made oath that he would carry through the affairs of Alan of Culing at the Court of Rome. Did John die on his journey, or did he fail in his suit? He never claimed the charter which he left at the hospital, where it may still be seen.

A charter recording a grant by the Master of St Bartholomew’s to the Bishop of Bath is preserved in St Paul’s; Sir Norman Moore says (i., p. 392), “It was pleasant to find this original document in the charter room of the cathedral, where mine was probably the first hand from St Bartholomew’s Hospital which had touched it since it received the seal of William the master and the brethren, six hundred and seventy years ago.”

I cannot resist quoting (i., p. 412) one more of the many touching and interesting episodes with which the history of St Bartholomew’s abounds:—

Cecilia, a widow, devoted herself to the altar of St Edmund and received a wedding ring. When she was dying (1251), a Dominican father, giving her the last sacrament, noticed the ring and said, “Take off that ring, lest she die so decked out.” Cecilia

roused herself and said she would offer the ring “before the judgement seat of God my betrothed.”

It is interesting to find that surnames were beginning to be established in the reign of Henry III. Thus a certain Thomas Niger is described as the son of Walter Niger. [141]

There are innumerable facts given in the history of St Bartholomew which illustrate the permanence of the London streets. Thus in a document of 1256 is mentioned a little lane going towards the church of St Mary Staining Lane. The little lane is easily found at this day leading from Wood Street to a small churchyard, on a stone in the wall of which is cut “Before the dreadful fire of 1666, here stood the church of St Mary Staining” (i., p. 441).

A document quoted (i., p. 454) is of interest in regard to the value of money in mediæval times; the following extract shows what in the reign of Henry II. was considered a serious sum. The hospital owed the butcher eleven pounds, and the master and brethren agreed to pay it in eight years and a quarter by a rent charge on a house.

The reader of Sir Norman Moore’s book is continually coming across unexpected facts. For instance, that St James’ Palace is on the site of what, in the reign of Henry III., was known as the Hospital of St James.

On 15th June 1253, St Bartholomew’s Hospital obtained from Henry III. two important charters,

one confirming them in their possessions, the other in their rights and privileges. The gift was made, among other reasons, for the soul “of King Henry my grandfather.”

The author succeeds in conveying to his readers the personal interest which he evidently feels in the writers of the deeds of which he makes such good use. Thus (i., p. 477) he quotes Maelbrigte, who made a copy of the later Gospels at Armagh in the time of Rahere, as writing “at the foot of a very small page of vellum in a minute and exquisite hand, ‘If it was my wish I could write the whole treatise like this,’ thus handing down to succeeding ages a scribe’s pride in his art.” Again in a charter copied into the hospital cartulary the last witness is “Master Simon, who wrote this charter.”

The author (i., p. 485) has occasion to refer to a grant by Stephen of Gosewelle of certain lands. And this reminds him how he heard Dickens read the trial in Pickwick. He says, in “almost every part I can recall his emphasis and the tone of his voice.—‘Mrs Bardell shrunk from the world and courted the retirement and tranquillity of Goswell Street.’ . . . Very few know that this thoroughfare was the street of a hamlet, extra barram de Aldredesgate.”

In a charter probably belonging to the earlier half of the reign of Henry III., a witness, Sabrichet, “has a name which survives in Sabrichetestead or Sabstead, the native pronunciation of Sawbridgeworth.” In the out-patient room a patient said that he came from Sawbridgeworth. The physician, [142]

who had been instructed by Henry Bradshaw, remarked that the patient did not know how to pronounce the name of his own home. On this the patient exclaimed, “Oh, I know it is Sabstead, but I thought the gentleman would not understand.”

Names have a fascination for me, and I cannot resist quoting the name of Henry Pikebone, who, I hope, pronounced it Pickbone, and might well have been one of Falstaff’s men. We meet (p. 510) with a reference to John of Yvingho, which is said to have suggested Ivanhoe to Walter Scott. I regret to say that John was a fishmonger. Elsewhere we meet another pleasing name, Cecilia Pidekin, but unfortunately she is not known in any other way than as the recipient, by a will of 1281, of a chemise and a little brass pail. There are innumerable points of interest in the matter of names. Thus the author points out that Shoe Lane has nothing to do with shoes nor indeed with lanes; it is a corruption of the solanda or prebend through which it passes.

The author often helps us to realise the appearance of the inhabitants of St Bartholomew’s. Thus (p. 551) the Bishop of London in his ordinance of 1316 settled that “those of the brethren who were priests were to wear round cloaks of frieze or other cloth, the lay brethren shorter cloaks; the sisters tunics and over-tunics of grey cloth, these not to be longer than to their ankles.” This last regulation is curious. We should have expected the limitation to have been applied to shortness rather than to length.

Walter of Basingbourne [144] was Master of the Hospital during the greatest epidemic of plague which “the Western world had experienced since the time of Justinian.” It is generally known as the Black Death, and was the same disease as that which terrified London in 1665, and the epidemic which has destroyed nearly nine millions of people in India since 1894.

Speaking (i., p. 584) of the Charter House, Sir Norman says: “Our hospital . . . saw the noble foundation of Thomas Sutton built, and became familiar with its brethren in their black cloaks and with the gown boys.” He quotes appositely enough Thackeray’s well-known words on the death of Colonel Newcome:—

“And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said ‘Adsum,’ and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called, and lo he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Master.”

In 1381 Wat Tyler and his mob sacked and burnt the Temple and the Priory of Clerkenwell. A few days later the brethren could see from their walls the blow struck by Walworth the Mayor, the fall of Tyler from his horse, and the courageous behaviour of King Richard. Wat Tyler was carried into the hospital, but the Mayor went in and brought him out and had him beheaded. Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded by the rebels.

Sir Norman Moore once asked a patient whence she came, and she answered “from Sudbury in Suffolk.” Dr Moore told his students the story of Simon’s death, and added that his head is said to be “preserved to this day at Sudbury.” The woman raised herself in bed and said, “My father keeps it.” Simon’s tomb at Canterbury has been opened, and was found to contain a headless body.

During the mastership of William Wakering, who died in 1405, and that of Sutton, John Mirfeld flourished in the priory of St Bartholomew and wrote his Breviarium Bartholomei, which may “fairly be regarded as the first book on medicine connected with St Bartholomew’s Hospital.”

The brethren had no watches, and had to measure “the time for heating fluids or making decoctions by reciting certain psalms and prayers.” I remember to have heard Sir Norman say how he demonstrated to his pupils the efficacy of the words which our ancestors prescribed for the cure of epilepsy. Their magic depended on the fact that they required some minutes to recite, and this allowed the patient to recover from his fit.

I did not expect to find any evidence in regard to Falstaff, but the following passage (ii., p. 2) shows that he must have been damped (in two senses) on a memorable occasion [145]:—“In the year 1413, on the ninth day of the month of April, which day was Passion Sunday, and a very rainy day, the coronation of Henry V. took place at Westminster, at which coronation I, Brother John Cok, who have recorded

that royal coronation for the refreshing of memory, was present and beheld it.”

Sir Norman says (ii., p. 40):—“I was present at the coronation of King George V., and watched the splendid assemblage gradually filling Westminster Abbey, . . . and heard the shouts of ‘God save King George!’ . . . and saw the King in his crown, with the orb in his left hand and the sceptre in his right, walk in solemn procession down the nave. . . . It was a solemn as well as a splendid sight. More than once during the day I thought of John Cok, the brother of St Bartholomew’s beholding five centuries ago within the same walls and under the same noble vault, the coronation of the future victor of Agincourt. . . .”

John Cok is a valuable witness as regards the history of the hospital, especially as to the mastership of John Wakeryng, who held office for forty years. Cok became Rentar of the Hospital, and the chief work of his life was the writing of the Cartulary (which he called a Rental), recording rents due to the hospital, deeds of gift, papal bulls, and other documents. Cok’s book (dated 1456) is a large volume written in Latin on 636 leaves of vellum and enclosed in an ancient binding of oak boards covered with leather.

In a transaction of 14th June 1423 is the first appearance of the arms at present used by the hospital (ii., p. 16), namely, party per pale argent and sable a chevron counter-changed. It was probably Wakeryng’s coat of arms, but ended by being regarded as that of the hospital. The author

suggests that the chevron “might symbolise the hospital roof, while the equally divided and counter-changed argent and sable suggested that each patient admitted had an even chance of recovery or of death.”

In 1432 arrangements were made for a water-supply to the hospital from Islington (Iseldon); and the “waste of water at the Cisterne” was to be conveyed “to the Gailes of Newgate and Ludgate for the reliefe of the prisoners.”

Cock Lane, near the hospital, has, I fear, no connection with brother John Cok (ii., p. 53); it was so called from the shops of the cooks who prepared refreshments for the crowds who came to Smithfield. It was at the end of Cock Lane that the fire of London stopped in 1666, but it is better known as the scene of the Cock Lane ghost.

Sir Richard Owen, who had been a student at St Bartholomew’s, told Dr Moore (ii., p. 54) a grim story of Cock Lane. It was there that the hospital authorities hired a house for the reception of the dead bodies of criminals hung at Newgate. “Owen was in a room on the first floor with Sir William Blizard, the President, who was attired in court dress as the proper costume for an official act. They heard the shouts of the crowd and then the noise of an approaching cart, which turned down Cock Lane and stopped at the door. Then came the heavy steps of the executioner tramping up the stairs. He had the body of a man who had been hanged on his back, and entering the room, let it fall on a table. . . . Sir William Blizard with a

scalpel made a small cut over the breast-bone, and bowed to the executioner. This was, I suppose, the formal recognition of the purpose for which the body had been delivered. The rumbling of the cart, the contrast between the stiff figure of Sir William Blizard in his court dress and the executioner in coarse clothes, and the thud of each dead body on the table remained in Owen’s memory to the end of his days; and his skill in telling the story has made me remember it nearly every time that I have walked down Cock Lane.”

On 1st March 1711, a piece of literature destined “to be famous as long as English is read, was published near the end of Duck Lane in Little Britain.” This was the first number of the Spectator, and “all London read it and enjoyed it, from the motto to the end.” The author (ii., p. 63) imagines Mr Addison walking down Duck Lane the Wednesday evening before its appearance, from Mr Buckley’s in Little Britain where he had corrected his last revise.

Sir Norman Moore adds: “For me . . . Duke Street, Little Britain, has innumerable memories of twenty-one happy years. I lived there as a student and as house physician, and then as Warden of the College of St Bartholomew’s.” He adds that his election as Warden was his first professional success, which was followed by a place on the permanent staff of the hospital. It was the home of his early married life, and here his eldest child was born. He need not have apologised (as he does); such details will surely please all sympathetic readers.

There is an interest in even the modern inhabitants of Little Britain. We hear of dealers in gold lace and gold leaf, and also a representative of that rare genus the teapot-handle maker. These handles could not be worked on a lathe, and had to be sawn out of the ivory. Dr Moore learned that in all London there was but one other teapot-handle maker: he felt what a favour it was when the great man mended a fan for Mrs Moore.

It is pleasant to meet with the well-known lines from Wordsworth’s poem of “Poor Susan”:—

“Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.”

I regret to say that our author quotes only to criticise, since he denies that the mists of Lothbury are visible in Cheapside.

In 1535 the hospital estate was valued at £305, 6s. 7d. according to one authority, and at £371, 13s. 2d. by another. St Bartholomew’s was then the third hospital in London in order of wealth. Henry VII.’s Hospital in the Savoy and the New Hospital of Our Lady outside Bishopsgate were richer (ii., p. 125).

The Act of Dissolution was passed in 1536, and the property of the hospital was given into the King’s hands in 1537. Thus the “old order, which had existed for more than four hundred years, was at an end, and the hospital was in the eye of the law vacant and altogether destitute of a master, and of all fellows or brethren” (ii., p. 126).

“Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, Gilbertines, Franciscans, Dominicans, and more, all were

banished from their ancient homes. . . . St Bartholomew’s Hospital was one of the few places where the injured tree of charity began to put forth new branches, and soon flourished again” (ii., p. 148).

The King, after five years’ delay, granted, on 23rd June 1544, [150] letters patent reconstituting the hospital for its original uses. William Turges, the King’s Chaplain, was the first Master, and “the body corporate was to be called ‘The Master and Chaplains of the Hospital of St Bartholomew in West Smithfield, near London.’” The grant did little for the poor, but it prevented the destruction of St Bartholomew’s and carried on its existence.

The figure of Henry VIII. is above the Smithfield Gate of the hospital. A full-length portrait of him hangs at the end of the Great Hall. He is also represented in a window of the hall handing the letters patent to the Lord Mayor and citizens. “Thus,” says the author, “do we commemorate this destroying King, who might have taken away all the estate of St Bartholomew’s, but only took a small portion of it” (ii., p. 161).

The constitution under which the hospital is ruled was established in 1547, and confirmed, with an alteration in but one important particular, in 1782. “Most of the offices created by the Deed of Covenant of December 1546, and the letters patent of January 1547, exist at the present day. The treasurer, the almoners, the physician, the surgeon, the rentar, the steward, the matron and sisters, the porter bearing a figure of St Bartholomew on his staff of office, and

the beadles with silver badges engraved with the hospital arms, are all parts of the present life of the hospital” (ii., p. 191).

Beside the grave benefactors of the hospital we hear of serio-comic personages who remind us of the curious lunatics recorded by de Morgan in his Budget of Paradoxes. Thus in 1774 Mr W. Gardiner offered £2000 to St Bartholomew’s “as a sacrifice for God’s having put it in his power to overturn Sir Isaac Newton’s system” (ii., p. 245).

From 1547 the treasurer was “a very important officer, but the president also took an active part in the affairs of the hospital.” But now the treasurer is the responsible head of the administration.

In 1518 the College of Physicians was founded by Henry VIII. (ii., p. 408) on the advice of Dr Thomas Linacre. Its active existence began in his house in Knightrider Street. The most pious and the most learned men of England were Linacre’s intimate friends, and the “example of his life, as felt in the College of Physicians, continues a living force to this day” (ii., p. 411).

Dr John Caius (ii., p. 412) was a devoted follower of Linacre; he was born 1510, went to Cambridge in 1529, and in 1533 was elected Fellow of Gonville Hall. In 1539 he went to Padua, where Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, was Professor. In 1547 Caius was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and not long after he came to live within St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

Caius wrote on the sweating sickness in 1552, and his work was printed near St Bartholomew’s. “Thus

were the proofs of the first medical monograph in the English tongue, and, indeed, the first book written by an English physician . . . on a particular disease, corrected in St Bartholomew’s” (ii., p. 418).

Caius was in 1555 elected President of the College of Physicians, to which he presented their silver caduceus with four serpents at its head, a book of statutes, and a seal. In 1557–69 he was engaged in the refoundation and building at Cambridge of what was to be known as Gonville and Caius College. On his death his viscera were buried in St Bartholomew’s the Less, while the rest of his body was placed in an alabaster tomb in the chapel of his college with the inscription: “Fui Caius.”

We meet with many proofs of the consideration shown by the authorities towards the patients. For instance (ii., p. 279):—

13th March 1568.—“This day it is graunted by the courte that Griffen Davye shall departe forthwith into his countrye, and also that he shall have 20s. in his purse to bringe him home in consideracion that he is lame and impotent.”

Again (ii., p. 293), “30th April 1597.—Ordered that curtaynes be provided for certain beds of the poor.” The author adds that “moveable curtains hang over the beds to this day, and are of great use in providing privacy when patients are washing and dressing.”

We meet with some trifling records of great events. Thus on 7th May 1660 it is ordered that “the shield of the States armes being the Redd Cross and Harpe be taken downe in the Court

Hall and the King’s arms put in the Roome thereof.”

But even the King could not impose on the hospital. Thus in 1661 there was a vacancy for a surgeon at the Lock. The King wrote in favour of John Knight, but John Dorrington was elected (ii., p. 316).

In 1666 the great fire of London was only prevented from reaching the hospital by pulling down houses. The consequent loss to the hospital may be set down as £2000 per annum. We are constantly meeting in the history of St Bartholomew’s interesting lights on the natural history of the patients. An entry as to the supply of beer (of which, by the way, the patients were allowed three pints daily) pleases me:—“Sir Jonathan Reymond, Knt. and Alderman, is to serve the matron’s cellar. Alderman Lt.-col. Freind is to supply small beer” (ii., p. 339). These personages doubtless belonged to the established church, for dissenters were not allowed to serve the hospital with any commodity.

An entry under 26th February 1704 throws a sinister light on the condition of the wards:—“Elizabeth Bond did propose to kill and clear the beds and wards of bugs within this house for 6s. per bed.” I hope Elizabeth Bond was more careful in her work than was the writer of the resolution (ii., p. 352).

It is interesting to come across the following:—

21st July 1737.—It was resolved “that the thanks of this Court be given to William Hogarth, Esquire . . . for his generous and free gift of the painting of the great staircase. . . .”

5th Jan. 1758.—A committee considered the

subject of visiting prisoners in Newgate, but the plan was apparently thrown over because prisoners were found entirely destitute of clothes, bedding, etc.

Even in the history of Mr Pickwick (chapter xlii.) we read that “not a week passes over our heads, but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some . . . must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their fellow prisoners.”

It is curious to find that in 1821 the function of the hospital as a school for students of medicine was something of a novelty. The reform seems to have been due to Abernethy.

In 1845, on 13th May, a unanimous resolution against female governors was carried. Dr Moore adds that “about half a century later they were admitted, and no disastrous consequences have ensued.” In 1851 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell was actually admitted as a student, and strange to say with satisfactory results.

The author relates [154] how he was walking back to St Bartholomew’s one hot summer afternoon when he saw at a small second-hand book shop Paulus Jovius’ history of his own times, printed in 1550. Within it Woodhull the collector had noted that he bought it at the sale of Dr Askew’s books. Next day Sir Norman met Robert Browning and mentioned the book to him: “He had read it, and recalled passages in it, and told most pleasantly how the bishop had concealed the manuscript in a

chest . . . when the Spaniards took Rome, and how a Spanish captain found out that Paulus Jovius valued the manuscript, and so only gave it up on receiving a promise of the emoluments of a living in the gift of the church” (ii., p. 539).

Sir George Burrows became physician in 1841:—“He did not hesitate to express censure where he thought censure required. A clergyman at St Bartholomew’s rather aggressively invited his criticism on a sermon which he had just delivered. ‘Let me tell you, sir,’ said Burrows, ‘that many a man has been put in a lunatic asylum for much less nonsense than you preached to us to-day’” (ii., p. 561).

Dr Frederic John Farre was elected physician, 1854. Farre was captain of Charterhouse School during Thackeray’s first year there. And in The Adventures of Philip the author tells how one of the boys laughed because Firmin’s eyes “filled with tears at some ribald remark, and was gruffly rebuked by Sampson major [i.e., Dr Farre], the cock of the whole school; and with the question, ‘Don’t you see the poor beggar’s in mourning, you great brute?’ was kicked about his business.”

Percivall Pott was elected assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew’s in 1745 and surgeon in 1749, holding office till 1787. There is in the hospital a fine portrait of him in a crimson coat, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. A very old lady, whose mother’s medical attendant had been dresser to Percivall Pott, told Dr Moore, on the authority of the above practitioner, that Pott often came to the hospital in a red coat, and sometimes wore a sword.

Occasional teaching in medicine had been carried out from the seventeenth century onwards, but the originator par excellence was John Abernethy, who was born in 1764 and became a pupil at St Bartholomew’s in 1779. He taught anatomy in a really scientific manner, but he did not succeed in permanently raising it from the region of cram which in my day at Cambridge it shared with Materia Medica.

Many stories are told of his abrupt manner with his private patients. Charles Darwin used to tell us of a patient entering Abernethy’s consulting room, holding out his hand and saying, “Bad cut,” to which Abernethy replied, “Poultice”; the patient departed, only to return in a day or two, when his laconic report, “Cut worse,” was answered by “More poultice.” Finally he came back cured and enquired what he owed the surgeon, who replied, “Nothing; you are the best patient I ever had, and I could not take a fee.”

Sir James Paget was assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew’s in 1847; he became surgeon in 1861; he resigned the position in 1871, and died in 1899. He was the chief surgeon of the Victorian age, and his success may be estimated by the fact that his professional income rose to £10,000 per annum. He freely gave of his store of knowledge, for instance in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions. William Morrant Baker was elected a surgeon of St Bartholomew’s in 1882. He was noted for the neatness of his dress, and Dr Francis Harris, who sometimes wore country clothes, told Dr Moore that

he occasionally hid in the porter’s lodge to avoid Baker’s critical eyes. He warned Dr Moore (who was a candidate for the Wardenship of the College) that those same eyes were on him in the matter of dress.

Sir William Church, who wrote on the Hospital Pharmacopœia, gives some astonishing facts. From 1866 to 1875 the annual consumption of sulphate of magnesia was 42½ hundredweights, i.e., about two cart-loads. “In 1836 8¾ tons of linseed meal were used, while from 1876 to 1885 the annual average was 15¾ tons, but in 1911 the poultice was so nearly obsolete that 3 cwt. sufficed. In 1837 96,300 leeches were used; . . . in 1868 the number had sunk to 2200. . . . It is now (1911) about 700” (ii., p. 714).

Chloroform first appears in the apothecaries’ ledger on 22nd November 1847, just one week after the publication of Sir James Y. Simpson’s treatise.

A pound of pure carbolic acid was used in 1865, in 1911 the quantity was 2½ tons. Nurses have increased from a “matron and eleven sisters in the reign of King Edward VI. to the matron, assistant-matron, thirty-eight sisters, and 268 nurses who form the highly trained nursing staff of the present day” (ii., p. 778).

I cannot resist quoting a reminiscence of Mr Mark Morris, the Steward of the Hospital, who was born early enough to remember “several cases . . . of wives who had been sold in Smithfield. A rope was loosely thrown round them, and as the seller handed the end of the rope to the buyer, the buyer gave him a shilling. The new marriage was regarded

. . . as in every way reputable and complete” (ii., p. 789).

We have space for but a few of Dr Moore’s pleasant reminiscences. A woman came from South Wales whose only language was Welsh. Her husband’s native language was Irish, and he had learned Welsh, but could speak no English. A scavenger came into the Casualty Department named Michael O’Clery. “An illustrious name,” said the physician (N. M.?) remembering a certain famous chronicler. The scavenger explained accurately to which part of the family of hereditary historians he belonged.

“Another patient, a shoemaker . . . gave the name of Conellan. ‘Have you ever heard,’ said the physician, ‘of Owen Conellan, who wrote a grammar?’ ‘My relation,’ replied the patient, ‘historiographer to His Majesty King George IV.’ Thus was the physician instructed in the biography of the grammarian” (ii., p. 873).

A mountebank, who gained his living by thrusting a sword, about a foot long, down his gullet was admitted to a surgical ward. The treatment consisted in putting probangs of india-rubber down the gullet, and in this the patient was more adroit than the highly skilled surgeon who attended him (ii., p. 874).

I like, too, the case of a patient who was described as an “arrow-maker,” and on being asked whether he did not call himself a fletcher, said, “Yes, but I thought you would not know.” We read, also, of ruler-makers with “their hair turned green by the

resin dust produced by their lathes.” Also of “secret springers and piercers,” who suggest murder and sudden death to the imperfectly informed.

The following incident (ii., p. 883) is interesting from the point of view of history:—A negro, Jonathan Strong, had been brutally beaten by his master, and was admitted to the hospital in 1765. On leaving he got work at a chemist’s in the city; all seemed well, when he was recognised by an agent of his former master, and seized as “the property of Mr Kerr.” Granville Sharp, who happened to be present, at once charged the agent with committing an assault. An action brought against Sharp lingered on for some time and was finally dropped. Strong remained free, but the general question of slavery in England was not settled till 1772. It is pleasant to know that in 1877 Dr Moore told the story of Jonathan Strong to William Lloyd Garrison.

SIR GEORGE AIRY [161]

In attempting to estimate this book, it is necessary to avoid first impressions, for what strikes one on opening its pages is its dullness. It is edited by his son, who, in a Personal Sketch, gives certain facts about his father without succeeding in being graphic or interesting in any way. There is too much detail of an unexciting quality, e.g., p. 272 (1867): “There was the usual visit to Playford in January. In April there was a short run to Alnwick and the neighbourhood in company with Mr and Mrs Routh. From 27th June to 4th July he was in Wales with his two eldest (sic) sons, visiting Uriconium, etc., on his return. From 8th August to 7th September he spent a holiday in Scotland and the Lake District of Cumberland with his daughter Christabel, visiting the Langtons at Barrow House, near Keswick, and Isaac Fletcher at Tarn Bank.” When this kind of thing occurs often it is intolerably wearisome.

The same criticism applies to the extracts from Sir George Airy’s diary, which his son publishes.

For instance, p. 172 (1845): “On 29th January I went with my wife on a visit to my uncle, George Biddell, at Bradfield St George, near Bury. On 9th June I went into the mining district of Cornwall with George Arthur Biddell. From 25th August to 26th September I was travelling in France with my sister and my wife’s sister, Georgiana Smith. I was well introduced and the journey was interesting. On 29th October my son Osmond was born. Mr F. Baily bequeathed to me £500, which realised £450.”

This is a class of facts which a man may like to record, but their publication when so often repeated is surely unnecessary. There is, however, this to be said—that minute accuracy was a marked feature in Airy’s character, and must therefore be made prominent; and it may be argued that the right degree of prominence can only be given by avoiding all suppression. I cannot think that this is so in the case of an editor. Nor can I believe that Airy would have approved of one detail in his son’s method of printing the book, namely, that the diary is enclosed in inverted commas throughout, while the editor’s occasional remarks are without them. It would surely have been simpler to say once for all that what is printed is an accurate copy of the diary, and to have given the editor’s remarks within square brackets.

George Biddell Airy was born at Alnwick on 27th July 1801. He seems to have belonged to a Westmoreland family, but his forbears for several generations were small farmers in Lincolnshire.

His father, William Airy, was clearly a person of energy and forethought, who laid by his summer’s earnings “in order to educate himself in winter.” He gave up farming as a young man and found employment in the excise, a profession not without danger in those early days when contraband trade was common. He is said to have had many fights with smugglers, but did not suffer the fate of the gauger in Guy Mannering, for Dirck Hatteraicks were not so common as youthful readers might desire.

In 1810 William Airy was transferred to Colchester, where, if there were fewer smugglers, there was more opportunity for education; and George was sent to a school in a street bearing the attractive name of Sir Isaac’s Walk. Four years later Airy went to the Colchester Grammar School, where he remained until 1819, when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. The only point of interest connected with his school life is the record (in his own words) of Airy’s remarkable verbal memory. “It was the custom for each boy once a week to repeat a number of lines of Latin or Greek poetry, the number depending very much on his own choice. I determined on repeating 100 every week. . . . It was no distress to me, and great enjoyment. At Michaelmas 1816 I repeated 2394 lines, probably without missing a word.”

On 18th October 1819 he went to Cambridge “on the top of the coach,” and was installed in lodgings in Bridge Street. A reputation for mathematics had preceded him, and he was kindly received

by Mr Peacock [164] and Professor Sedgwick. It will be remembered that some twenty years later both these personages interested themselves in another Cambridge undergraduate—Charles Darwin.

Airy (p. 23) showed Mr Peacock a manuscript book containing “a number of original Propositions” which he had investigated. This increased his reputation in the University, but he was destined to be eminent in quite another direction. On the recommendation of Clarkson—who, as the chief Abolitionist, ought to have been more revolutionary—he followed the rule almost universally neglected—that undergraduates should wear drab knee breeches. Though Airy must soon have discovered that the reign of breeches was over, he continued, like the careful youth he was, to wear them for three terms.

In the winter of his freshman’s year, he did some original research in mathematics. This praiseworthy undertaking was characteristically treated by two of his advisers: Mr Peacock encouraged him to work out his problems; but his tutor (who bore the appropriate name of Hustler) disapproved of Airy’s employing his time on such speculations.

He describes with characteristic precision his way of life as an undergraduate. He never failed to keep the four statutory morning chapels. Then came breakfast, and College lectures occupied him from nine till eleven. He then went back to his rooms, and instead of at once getting to his mathematics, he wrote a piece of Latin prose. At two o’clock he “went out for a long walk, usually 4 or 5 miles, into the country: sometimes if I found companions I rowed on the Cam (a practice acquired rather later)”; College Hall was at four, after which he “lounged” until it was time to go to evening chapel (five-thirty). About six he had tea, and then “read quietly, usually a classical subject, till eleven; and I never, even in the times when I might seem most severely pressed, sat up later.”

In his second year he was asked to coach one Rosser, a man of his own year, for which he was paid at the rate of £14 per term. “This occupied two hours every day, and I felt that I was now completely earning my own living. I never received a penny from my friends after this time.”

His undergraduate life ended triumphantly in his being Senior Wrangler. He refers (p. 39) to the hardships of the examination: “The season was a cold one, and no fire was allowed in the Senate House, where the examination was carried on . . . and altogether it was a severe time.” His reference to the ceremonial of degree-taking has a little self-glorification which is not characteristic of him:—“I, as Senior Wrangler, was led up first to receive the

degree, and rarely has the Senate House rung with such applause as then filled it.”

In January 1823 he came back to Cambridge and started business as a coach with four pupils, each of whom paid him twenty guineas a term. [166] By this time the great series of his published papers had begun—indeed No. 1, “On the use of Silvered Glass for the mirrors of Reflecting Telescopes,” had already been published in 1822, by the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

It was in 1824 that “came one of the most important occurrences” of his life, namely, meeting the beautiful girl Richarda Smith, who was to become his wife. They were engaged in 1824 and married six years later. I venture the guess that her health was never very strong, for she seems not to have been much with Airy in his holiday wanderings. Wilfrid Airy speaks of “their deep respect and affection for one another.”

On 1st October 1824, in his twenty-third year, he was elected to a Trinity fellowship. Macaulay, who was elected the same day, speaks somewhere of the especial value he placed on this most pleasant honour, but he was thinking of the life of a resident Fellow, and Airy at once told his tutor of his intention of going out into the world. He began, however, in the October term to give mathematical lectures in Trinity. The reader is not surprised to find that Airy now gave up the custom which he “had followed with such regularity for five years,

namely, that of daily writing Latin.” I wonder what other Senior Wrangler wrote Latin prose while reading for the Tripos?

We have seen that the great stream of his original work had been established. In 1822 he wrote one paper, in 1824 three, in 1825 two, in 1826 three, and in 1827 five; and this stream was to flow for sixty-five years, i.e., until 1887!

On December 1826 he was elected to the Lucasian professorship, and thus became a successor of Sir Isaac Newton. The salary when Airy was elected was but £99 a year; the present holder is more adequately paid, and receives £850 annually. His prospects in 1827 were, however, not very good. He had to resign his tutorship when he became a professor, and thus lost £51 of income. As he would not take orders, his fellowship, according to the atrocious system of the day, would come to an end in seven years. But he surely judged wisely in accepting the poorly paid office. He had to lecture in a room, not intended for the purpose, in the old Botanic Gardens. This region is now occupied by science buildings, but bears a memory of its former history in the great Sophora tree flourishing there.

He was soon to obtain better paid work, for in 1828 he was elected Plumian professor, and giving up his college rooms he moved into the Observatory, where his official career as an astronomer began. During the following years, up to 1834, he was busy with professorial work and his duties at the Cambridge Observatory. He began to receive public acknowledgments of his character and his work. In

1835 he was elected a correspondent of the French Academy. In the same year Sir Robert Peel (p. 106) offered him a pension of £300 per annum, with no terms of any kind, and allowing it to be settled, “if I should think fit, on my wife.”

On 11th June 1835 the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote offering Airy the office of Astronomer Royal, which was accepted. Another honour—that of Knighthood—he declined in the same year. In 1863 the same honour was again offered and declined with dignity, on the ground that fees of “about £30” were demanded. Finally, in 1872 he was offered the K.C.B. and knighted by the Queen at Osborne. In reply to the congratulations of a friend, Airy wrote: “The real charm of these public compliments seems to be, that they excite the sympathies and elicit the kind expressions of private friends or of official superiors as well as subordinates. In every way I have derived pleasure from these.”

With regard to other honours, it is pleasant to discover that Airy, one of the most accurate of men, could make minute mistakes. Thus in 1863 he speaks (p. 254) of the academical degree of D.C.L. held by him in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But at Cambridge the degree in question is known as LL.D.

It may be well to give here, irrespective of dates, some of the other honours received by Airy.

In 1867 he (in company with Connop Thirlwall) was elected to the newly instituted Honorary Fellowships of Trinity—a distinction which seems to have given him especial pleasure.

In 1872 he was chosen as “Foreign Associate of the Institut de France” (p. 297), and wrote a strongly worded letter of thanks to Elie de Beaumont and J. B. Dumas, the Perpetual Secretaries. In the same year he wrote (p. 299) to the Emperor of Brazil in acknowledgment of the Grand Cross of the Rose of Brazil.

In 1851 he was President of the British Association at Ipswich. He showed his sense of duty in a characteristic way (p. 207). “Prince Albert was present, as [a] guest of Sir William Middleton; I was engaged to meet him at dinner, but when I found that the dinner day was one of the principal soirée days, I broke off the engagement.” In 1871 Airy was chosen President of the Royal Society. He wrote to a friend (p. 293): “The election . . . is flattering, and has brought to me the friendly remembrance of many persons; but in its material and laborious connections, I could well have dispensed with it, and should have done so but for the respectful way in which it was pressed on me.” He resigned the Presidency in 1873 (p. 303), giving his reasons as follows:—“The severity of official duties, which seem to increase, while vigour to discharge them does not increase; and the distance of my residence. . . . Another reason is a difficulty of hearing, which unfits me for effective action as Chairman of the Council.”

It is quite beyond my powers to estimate the value of Airy’s work as Astronomer Royal; I therefore quote from Schuster and Shipley’s Britain’s Heritage of Science, p. 165:—“In astronomy he proved himself to be equally eminent as an

administrator and investigator. He introduced revolutionary reforms in the practice of observatories by insisting on a rapid reduction and publication of all observations. After his appointment as Astronomer Royal, he set to work at once to reduce the series of observations of planets which had accumulated during eighty years without any use having been made of them. This was followed up by a similar reduction of 8000 lunar observations. He was equally energetic in adding to the instrumental equipment. When Greenwich was first founded, the longitude determination at sea depended to a great extent on measuring the distance between stars and the moon. Hence accurate tables of the position of the moon were essential, and the preparation of these tables has always been considered to be the chief care of Greenwich. The observations were made with a transit telescope which could only be used when the moon was passing the meridian, until Airy in 1843 persuaded the Board of Visitors to take steps for constructing a new instrument which would enable him to observe the moon in any position. In 1847 this instrument was at work, and other important additions to the equipment were made as occasion arose. . . .

“Among his theoretical investigations in pure astronomy, one of the most important resulted in the discovery of a new inequality in the motions of Venus and the earth due to their mutual attraction, and this led to an improvement in the solar tables.”

Nor should it be forgotten that Airy “originated

the automatic system by which the Greenwich time signals are transmitted each day throughout the country.”

With regard to the celebrated case of the planet Neptune, “which Adams predicted would be found—as it was found by the Berlin observer Galle, to whom Leverrier indicated its position,” Messrs Schuster and Shipley “cannot absolve either Airy or Challis [the Cambridge Astronomer] from blame.”

Airy writes (p. 181): “The engrossing subject of this year [1846] was the discovery of Neptune. As I have said (1845), I obtained no answer from Adams to a letter of enquiry. Beginning with June 26th of 1846, I had correspondence of a satisfactory character with Leverrier, who had taken up the subject of the disturbance of Uranus, and arrived at conclusions not very different from those of Adams. I wrote from Ely on July 9th to Challis, begging him, as in possession of the largest telescope in England, to sweep for the planet and suggesting a plan. I received information of its recognition by Galle, when I was visiting Hansen at Gotha. For further official history, see my communications to the Royal Astronomical Society, and for private history see the papers in the Royal Observatory. I was abused most savagely both by English and French.”

Having been Astronomer Royal from 1835, Airy, being eighty years of age, resigned his post in 1881, receiving (p. 340) a “retired allowance of £1100 per annum.”

His son writes (p. 346), “On the 16th of August

1881 Airy left the Observatory,” which had been his home “for nearly 46 years, and removed to the White House. Whatever his feeling may have been at the severing of his old associations he carefully kept them to himself, and entered upon his new life with the cheerful composure and steadiness of temper which he possessed in a remarkable degree.”

His son continues (p. 347): “The work to which he chiefly devoted himself in his retirement was the completion of his Numerical Lunar Theory. This was a vast work, involving the subtlest considerations of principle, very long and elaborate mathematical investigations of a high order, and an enormous amount of arithmetical computation.” Of this work Airy wrote, p. 349 (apparently in 1886): “The critical trial depends on the great mass of computations in Section ii. These have been made in duplicate, with all the care for accuracy that anxiety could supply. Still I cannot but fear that the error which is the source of discordance must be on my part.” The work was continued until October 1888, but without success.

He continued to show his characteristic fearlessness in what he considers to be his duty. Thus in 1883 (p. 355) he refused to sign a memorial in favour of the burial of Mr Spottiswoode in Westminster Abbey, on the ground that he had not conferred “great and durable” benefits on society. In 1883 he wrote (p. 356) to the Vicar of Greenwich protesting against choral service in the church. I shall quote his words as almost a solitary example of his use of picturesque English:—“For a venerable persuasion there is

substituted a rude irreverential confusion of voices; for an earnest acceptance of the form offered by the Priest there is substituted—in my feeling at least—a weary waiting for the end of an unmeaning form.”

In 1887 his son records (p. 361) that Airy’s private accounts gave him much trouble. It had been his custom to keep them by double entry in very perfect order. “But he now began to make mistakes and to grow confused, and this distressed him greatly . . . and so he struggled with his accounts as he did with his Lunar Theory till his powers absolutely failed.”

In 1889 he had the satisfaction of knowing that his system of compass correction in iron ships had been universally adopted. Whether the Admiralty ought to be proud of the fact that fifty years had elapsed since Airy’s discovery was made known is another question.

Sir George Airy died 2nd January 1892. It is recorded that before the end came he had been lying quietly for several days “reciting the English poetry with which his memory was stored.”

SYDNEY SMITH [175a]

“I thank God, Who has made me poor, that He has made me merry.”