was the only remedy for such an imbroglio, and, as Huxley
wrote to Hooker about a similar case a couple of years later:--

It's deuced hard to keep straight in this wicked world, but,
as you say, the only chance is to out with it, and I thank you
much for writing so frankly about the matter.

[Illustration: From a Photograph by Downey, 1890 To face p. 102]

With Hooker, the keen observer and critical reasoner, the man of warm
impulses and sane judgments, he had a peculiarly intimate bond of
friendship summed up in a letter of 1888, when they had received the
Copley medal in successive years:--

It is very pleasant to have our niches in the Pantheon close
together. It is getting on for forty years since we were first
"acquent," and, considering with what a very considerable dose
of tenacity, vivacity, and that glorious firmness (which the
beasts who don't like us call obstinacy) we are both endowed,
the fact that we have never had the shadow of a shade of a
quarrel is more to our credit than being ex-Presidents and
Copley medallists. But we have had a masonic bond in both
being well salted in early life. I have always felt that I
owed a great deal to my acquaintance with the realities of
things gained in the old _Rattlesnake_.

From earliest days, soon after they had returned, the one from the
South Seas, the other from the Himalayas, they had stood shoulder
to shoulder confidently in the struggle to put science on a firm
and independent footing. When the future of the Natural History
Collections at the British Museum was in the balance, they
energetically resolved to constitute themselves into a permanent
"Committee of Safety," to watch over what was being done and take
measures with the advice of others when necessary. Together as
biologists they realized the greatness of Darwin's vision; together
they bore the brunt of the battle of the _Origin_ at Oxford. In
seeking a good mouthpiece for scientific opinion, in reorganizing
and administering the great scientific societies, in their work for
scientific education, they shared the same ideas, and their friendship
and Tyndall's formed the starting-point of the _x_ Club, with its
regular meetings of old friends. More than once they went off on a
short holiday tour together, and when Huxley was invalided in 1873 it
was Hooker who took charge and carried him off for a month's active
trip in the geological paradise