May 22, 1883.
... I wish to condole with you over a hardship which you write of, that of having to write a book on Lord Bacon. I quite understand that you should bemoan your fate at being drawn into that undertaking. I cannot think it at all to your liking. Bacon, of all people, if the best is to be made of him, I fancy, should be written of by a worldly-wise, if not a worldly-minded man. Moreover, I must confess to a heretical opinion as to another side of Bacon, that in which English, and all English-speaking, people glory. To blab it out: I have an ugly notion that he was rather a sciologist than a man of science, and that he really did nothing of real consequence for the furtherance of science; nothing to be compared with Galileo, a real father of “inductive philosophy” and scientific investigation—and Pascal. By the way, taking the two men all round, do you not think a taking parallel could be run with Bacon and Pascal?
Now, to change the subject,—what a noble old man Gladstone is, and what a great name he is going to leave as a high-minded statesman! I could envy you, if it were in my way, the privilege of his friendship.
H. was so good as to write me a charming letter from her new home, for which please give her my thanks.
By the way, if you see our observatory director, Pickering, you will find him an unaffected man, wise in science above his years.
TO J. D. HOOKER.
Cambridge, September 3, 1883.
My dear Hooker,—A letter of yours of July 24 has been on my table a good while, and now to-day comes yours of August 22. So I am to write you at once, urged thereto mainly by your quandary about subspecies, varieties, and how to manage them in a popular flora like the British, in which forms need to be distinguished more than in outlandish floras.
I have a decided opinion as to the form of treatment, and from your letter, as well as I can gather, I coincide with Ball. At least, I would not have subspecies. They are, as the saying goes, “neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.”
Some you would accept as species; make of the rest varieties, with names.