WCP5540

[1]¹

Capetown.

April 1^st. [18]’96²

My dear Friend

I have certainly two, probably three, of your always welcome letters for reply.

You promise me, hypothetically, a photo[graph]. of your feminine corps of gardeners. So they have burst open your gates: nunc scis quid faemina furens, Possit³[sic] — I can understand feminine fingers being smart at bouquet-making, at grafting, and the toilette of the greenhouse, but how will it be with trenching, digging of borders, manuring and the like. It won’t do for the New Gardener to join on the principle of selecting the fancy part of the work for herself and doing it in gloves.

My arrangement with Wallace about my Fruit-chapter has fallen through. He is determined to stick to it, & declares it was already in type as an annexure before my interference. So it must e’[v]en go. Scots-wha’hae⁴ are hard to beat when their own interest is concerned, a sentiment which I, a Yorkshire-man, heir only to a prenomen of Mac, may say without being charged with want of patriotism⁵.

I feel quite sure that you would fully understand the spirit of the m[anu]s[cript]. scratches made on your advance sheets. They were just what occurred to me as suggestions, not as correction, and were of course, like suggestions, to leave or take just as they chimed in with the editor’s views. It was kindly and polite for your excellent Mr Brown⁶ to take the trouble to note a memorandum of explanations; but [2]⁷ truly there was no need. I fully appreciate the force of his memo[randum]., particularly the discretion of not taking up citations unseen by the author. Pray make my compliments and thanks to him.

Now I appreciate what you say about repeated polishing your work, the limae labor⁸, which at once irritates and pleases all true word-smiths before turning out their finished work! I have some more species to send you for the Diagnoses⁹, but am dissatisfied with them. Perhaps I shall take them by the horns some day, and rush them over. Of course you will want an additional grant. But I advise that nothing overt be said about it until actual publication has taken place, of at least a part. Not that this would matter with Sir Gordon Sprigg¹⁰, who could be relied on for common sense. But we are on the eve of a meeting of what we call our "parliament," and a good deal of cheap nonsense and fustian would be talked about the date of the vol[ume] iii & of the last grant. I do not know whether the fox prides himself on his peculiarly nasty smell — should think not, from the hunting point of view, — but we have a set of men who think that genius consists [of] cheap smartness and nasty innuendo. The type of gentlemanly cove of this genus is J. X. Merriman¹¹, who got himself into the Molteno¹² cabinet by making grimaces of an aggravating sort in Sir John Molteno’s face every time he spoke in the House, [3] crowing like a rooster & baaing like a lamb, till the poor old Premier could stand it no longer, & gave him a ministerial billet to quiet him. Fact, I assure you, tho’[ough] it is convenient for the leader of your present opposition¹³ to forget it. At the other pole is a ci-devant¹⁴newspaper man, one William Hay¹⁵, a Kingwilliamstowner, a howling cad. As soon as a part is out, I will make a business of talking the matter over with Sir Gordon. Parliament will be sitting until late in May: and the supplementary estimates come last. Your own suggestion to him made by letter would have their due weight doubtless. Sprigg has taken an enlightened view of the Government’s duty in regard to the Museum & the Library. I hope the curator who is to succeed poor old Trimen¹⁶ will turn out a trump. We get so "stuck" with imported experts, but "economic Entomologist" will be anything but economical. We wanted Riley¹⁷ to send us a Yankee "scientist", as they call it, of first class merit, something like L. Howard¹⁸. But although we offered £600 per annum, salary of an under-secretary here, we got merely a young student of the Experiment station in Massachusetts. He confessed on arrival that he had never worked in the open field, was merely a laboratory man, had never seen an orange grove or practised the modern spraying or fumigations with HCN¹⁹, in short, had everything to learn. Eustace Pillans²⁰ & I stuffed him with all we could out of our cultural experience, but he [4] seems disposed to be shy of us. It is the fiasco of the German wine-experts, v[on]. Babo & Mayr²¹, over again — men who were immensely successful in making — vinegar! I begin to think that capable men are very scarce all over the world.

Enclosed is a cutting, with a local view of my little report just out, and I have refrained from snipping off the important Matabele news²² of yesterday. If only the G. O. M.²³ of years ago had not scuttled out of the Transvaal after ^the Majuba Hill²⁴ business, on an old Woman in plea of "bloodguiltiness"²⁵ there would never have been the atrocious mess into which things have got at present, both with the wire-pulled Boer President²⁷, and with the northern savage.

Bolus²⁶ starts on the 8th. bringing heaps of his plants for working up. I think he hankers after a revision of Ericaceae²⁷. He knows them much better than any of us, and is charmingly honest & dogged in his work. He has just returned from a lengthened trip with young Flanagan²⁸, the best of our rising collector-botanists.

I am, I fear, like Paulus²⁷, a desperately long-winded correspondent. But to write to Kew²⁹ — that is to you, does me good like a medicine. No more however today — I spare you.

Faithfully | P. MacOwan [signature]