He was not mistaken.  Among his most precious possessions he kept Forbes’s reply:—­

I heartily concur in the course you have taken, and, had I been placed as you have been, would have done exactly the same....  Your way of proceeding was as true an act of friendship as any that could be performed.  As to myself, I dream so little about medals that the notion of being on the list never entered my brain, even when asleep.  If it ever comes, I shall be pleased and thankful; if it does not, it is not the sort of thing to break my equanimity.  Indeed, I would always like to see it given not as a mere honour, but as a help to a good man, and this it is assuredly in Hooker’s case.  Government people are so ignorant that they require to have people’s merits drummed into their heads by all possible means, and Hooker’s getting the medal may be of real service to him before long.  I am in a snug, though not an idle, nest; he has not got his resting-place yet.  And so, my dear Huxley, I trust that you know me too well to think that I am either grieved or envious; and you, Hooker, and I are much of the same way of thinking.

Frankness 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