Life and Letters:
Chapter One

Early Days

[Editor’s note: this chapter was pp.1–36 in the printed edition.
The original footnotes are shown in {curly brackets}: clicking on one will take you to the list of notes.]

A life whose span is almost a century may well be witness of great changes: the ninety-four years of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker’s life are the more intensely interesting because he himself was one of the chief workers in bringing about such changes. Indeed, the century almost covered by his life saw a greater revolution than any of our era except, perhaps, that of the Renaissance. Once more the civilised world was born anew: it was the century of the New Renaissance. The revolution in thought was paralleled by a revolution in the means of civilised life. The two influences united in effecting the most profound readjustments alike in social values and in the outlook of the human mind. Power over nature transformed the way of life: the insight into nature which secured that power, equally freed inquiring minds from the barriers imposed by the established guides of thought, who only permitted nature to be interpreted through the perspective of creed.

Against those barriers the flood of natural knowledge had been slowly piling itself up, only awaiting the hand that should open a channel and a fresh impulse and a common direction to these chained-up currents. Mechanical aids, such as the magnifying lens, had opened the way to new investigations of life since the seventeenth century. From the needs of medicine sprang the organised knowledge both of botany and of animal life: first the herbal and the history book of animals, full of strange lore; then the gradual searching out of living framework and vital processes, which finally took rank and order as the anatomy and physiology of animals and plants. That these researches awakened doubts of the conventional creeds as applied to nature is evidenced by the familiar sneer at the dangerous folk who recognised the constancy of natural law in the workings of the human frame—ubi tres medici, ibi duo athei. Chemistry began to emerge experimentally from the mists of alchemy some half-century before Hooker’s birth. Geology took operative shape yet later: with Lyell’s ‘Principles’ in 1839 the first step was built of the stairway that actually led to the theory of evolution. The succession of differing forms of similar creatures in a fossil state provoked challenge of the doctrine of immutability of species; indeed, as has been well said, if the theory of evolution had not existed, Geology would have had to invent it. By the fifties, also, botany, in its search for a natural system of classification, was ripe for the acceptance of an evolutionary explanation.

If the interest awakened by scientific men is proportioned to the degree in which their researches and discoveries come home to ‘men’s business and bosoms,’ giving new colour or shape to the eternal questions of the making of the heavens and the earth, the nature of matter, the play of subtle forces, the laws of life and disease, man’s place in the universe, his origin and his destiny, then in every province of physics and astronomy, in medicine and its fellow sciences, the nineteenth century saw great and memorable figures stand out: but most memorable the central group, who, touching most nearly upon life and its place in the universe, awoke the loudest opposition and achieved the greatest triumph.

Charles Lyell pointed the way to Darwin: after the appearance of the ‘Origin of Species,’ Thomas Henry Huxley was chief champion in the support and spread of evolution on the one hand, and, on the other, of freedom of scientific thought and speech. It was Hooker’s privilege to be Darwin’s sole confidant for near fifteen years, his-generous friend, his unstinting helper, his keen critic, and ultimate convert in the light of his own work and the material he could so abundantly furnish. The story of Joseph Hooker’s life-work is, in one aspect, the history of the share taken by botany in establishing the theory of evolution and the effect produced upon it by acceptance of that theory. He began with unrivalled opportunities, and made unrivalled use of them. As a botanist, he was born in the purple, for in the realm of botany his father, Sir William Hooker, was one of the chief princes, and he had at hand his father’s splendid herbarium and the botanic garden which he had made one of the scientific glories of Glasgow University.

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Joseph Hooker’s earliest recollections are preserved in an autobiographical fragment, set down late in his life. Noteworthy among the events that emerge from childish forgetfulness, like hill-tops above a sea of mist, is the early love of nature and especially of plants, inborn in him and indeed inherited from both lines of his parentage. His father and his mother’s father were both botanists, and singularly enough they both began their studies as such with the mosses, quite independently of one another; so that, being confessedly ‘a born Muscologist,’ he playfully dubs himself ‘the puppet of Natural Selection.’ {Note 1}

I was born [he writes] June 30, 1817, at Halesworth, Suffolk, being the second child and son of William Jackson Hooker and Maria, nee Turner, of Great Yarmouth. My brother was older than myself and my parents had subsequently three daughters. I was named Joseph after my Grandfather Hooker, and Dalton after my godfather, the Rev. James Dalton, M.A., F.L.S., Rector of Croft, Yorkshire, a student of carices and mosses and discoverer of Scheuchzeria in England.

My memory reverts to a very early age-when only three years old to my father’s house at Halesworth, and incidents connected therewith, amongst others the gardener, in mowing a damp meadow behind the house, slicing the frogs with his scythe, and my brother running along the top of the garden wall to my mother’s alarm. He died in 1840. Curiously enough I have no recollection of a magnificent dog, a Newfoundland I believe, that my father kept, and which was notorious for its thefts from the butchers’ shops of the town.

My Grandfather Hooker’s house in Magdalen Street, Norwich, I remember even better, where my grandmother used to show me the glazed drawers of his insect cabinet. On leaving Halesworth for Glasgow, my father sold his insects to Mr. Sparshall of that city, a well-known collector. The collection is now in the Norwich Museum. Also I well remember his little garden and greenhouse of succulent plants, and on seeing a Coccinella on a post, repeating to it the stave

Bishop Bishop Barnabee
When will your marriage be?
If it be to-morrow’s day,
Take your wings and fly away.

Of my Grandfather Turner’s house in Yarmouth, I remember being carried there in my nurse’s arms early in 1821, on the eve of my mother taking myself, brother and sisters to Glasgow, where my father, who had taken up his Professorship in the previous summer, was awaiting us. My grandfather occupied the house of Gurney’s Bank, of which he was a resident Director. I remember distinctly the railings before the Bank, its drawing-room, and my aunts’ seizing me from my nurse, dancing with me round the room, and striking the harp to amuse me. Also I remember the walls of the room being covered with pictures of which my grandfather had a small but very choice collection. This collection was sold after my grandfather’s death in 1858. Some of the pictures, notably the Titian, a Hobbema and, I think, a Greuze and one or more Cotmans are in the Wallace Collection.

Of the journey from Yarmouth to Glasgow by post horses I have a distinct recollection, during which my mother caught ague in crossing the Fens, with which she was troubled for many years. Of incidents I can only remember my brother running to eat a cake of white soap, mistaking it for an apple. I also distinctly remember the picturesque place, Inn of Beattock Bridge, in Dumfriesshire, but why I cannot tell.

My next memory is the arrival in Glasgow by night, and going into lodgings (No. 1, Bath Street) which my father had taken pending his obtaining possession of a new house which he had purchased in West Bath Street (No. 17), in which lodgings I found my Grandfather and Grandmother Hooker, who had accompanied or followed my father to Glasgow with a mass of furniture from the Halesworth and Norwich houses, on some bedding from which I slept, for the first night, on the floor.

Of the following years I have little of note to record beyond having an excellent governess, a Miss Turnbull, of whom I was very fond, and a mild attack of scarlet fever when I was six. No doubt I had other illnesses of childhood, as I had the credit of being the leader in contracting them. At the age of five or six, my early leaning towards botany was shown by a love of mosses, and my mother used to tell an anecdote of me, that, when I was still in petticoats, I was found grubbing in a wall in the dirty suburbs of the dirty city of Glasgow, and that, when she asked me what I was about, I cried out that I had found Bryum argenteum (which it was not), a very pretty little moss I had seen in my father’s collection, and to which I had taken a great fancy.{Note 2} At a later period, when still in my early teens, I took up the study of these beautiful objects, and formed a good collection of the Scottish species in the Highlands and elsewhere; and my first effort as an author was the description of three new mosses from the Himalaya.{Note 3}

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Of this early love of botany and kindred eagerness for travel, he continues in the Royal Society speech already quoted

A little older, and when still a child, my father used to take me excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good deal, but also botanised; and well I remember on one occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, 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. Another little circumstance connected with a moss had also its influence on my future career. You may remember a passage in Mungo Park’s ‘Travels’ in search of the source of the Niger, when he describes himself so faint with hunger and fatigue, that he laid himself down to die; but being attracted by the brilliant green of a little moss on the bank hard by, said to himself: If God cares for the life of that little moss, He surely will not let me perish in the desert. Park put a piece of it in his pocket-book, and, fortified by the thought, went on his way. He soon arrived at a but occupied by poor black women, who fed him, and sang him to sleep with impromptu words, pitying the poor white man far away from his home and friends.{Note 4} A scrap of that moss was given to my father by Mungo Park, or a friend of his, and was shown to me. It excited in me a desire to read African travels, and I indulged in the childish dream of entering Africa by Morocco, crossing the greater Atlas (that had never been ascended) and so penetrating to Timbuctoo. That childish dream I never lost; I nursed it till, half a century afterwards, when, as your President has told you to-day, I did (with my friend Mr. Ball, who is here by me, and another friend, G. Maw, F.L.S.), ascend to the summit of the previously unconquered Atlas.

When still a child, I was very fond of Voyages and Travels; and my great delight was to sit on my grandfather’s knee and look at the pictures in Cook’s ‘Voyages.’ The one that took my fancy most was the plate of Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen Land, with the arched rock standing out to sea, and the sailors killing penguins; and I thought I should be the happiest boy alive if ever I would see that wonderful arched rock, and knock penguins on the head. By a singular coincidence, Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen Land, was one of the very first places of interest visited by me, in the Antarctic Expedition under Sir James Ross.

‘The spirit of a youth that means to be of note, begins betimes,’ and heredity and early training are strong among the directing factors for such a spirit. As has been said, Hooker’s father, William Jackson Hooker, was one of the first botanists of his age; his grandfather, Joseph Hooker, spent much of his leisure in the cultivation of rare plants; his maternal grandfather, Dawson Turner, of Yarmouth, banker, botanist, and antiquarian, was especially interested in the cryptogams, made collections, and published sumptuous volumes.

The Hookers, who claimed lineal descent from John Hooker, alias Vowell’, the historian, and uncle of Richard, the ‘Judicious,’ author of the ‘Ecclesiastical Polity,’ were a Devonshire family settled in Exeter, who dropped their original name of Vowell in the sixteenth century.

There is a very old parchment genealogical tree taken from the Heralds’ College in 1597, continued since and completed from other sources, which traces the Hooker ancestry for five centuries. The first name of the series, Seraph Vowell, hailing from Pembroke, suggests a Welsh origin in Ap-Howell. The second in descent, Jago Vowell, marries Alice Hooker, daughter and heiress of Richard Hooker of Hurst Castle, Hampshire, whose family name is adopted with his own. Hence the constant repetition in the genealogy of ‘Vowell alias Hooker.’

Though offshoots of the Hookers, especially after the Civil War, are found as successful traders at Crediton or as far afield as London, where one became Lord Mayor, the Hooker family is most closely associated with Exeter, where it is still represented. Thus a John Hooker was M.P. for Exeter in 1470; Robert Hooker, youngest born and sole survivor of twenty brothers and sisters, in 1529, and his son, another John, in 1571. This latter John was the first Chamberlain of Exeter, and wrote a book on the antiquities of Exeter, still preserved in the city archives. He exemplified the active business capacity of many of his name by founding the first ‘Guild of Merchant Adventurers ‘under a charter from Queen Mary. It was not long before the Devon Merchant Adventurers were typified by his kinsman, John Oxenham, Drake’s comrade, and the first Englishman to sail on the Pacific. Adventure also took John Hooker with Sir Peter Carew to Ireland, where he became a member of the Irish Parliament in 1568.

But the world owes him a greater debt. He supplied the means for educating his nephew Richard, the ‘Judicious’ Hooker. Next after the Chamberlain comes the Vicar of Caerhayes in Cornwall, from whose son Valentine the modern Hooker family traces its descent. Post-Reformation Hookers tended to Puritanism. In the Laudian persecutions the Rev. Thomas Hooker escaped to America, and there founded a family which has won its own meed of distinction in Church and State. ‘Fighting Joe Hooker,’ for instance, gained his by-name in the War of North and South.

Another Hooker is recorded as fighting under Fairfax and Essex in our own Civil War, afterwards settling down at Crediton.

Among the 2000 clergy who were driven from their livings after the Act of Uniformity were several Hookers. One is mentioned as minister of the Presbyterian chapel at Crediton, another at Chumleigh. The chapel registers show that many of the name became Nonconformists. Zeal for the Protestant cause led some to join in Monmouth’s ill-starred rebellion; those who escaped the scaffold at Exeter ended their lives as slaves in Barbados.{Note 5}

The Joseph Hooker already mentioned, seventh in descent from John, migrated from Exeter and set up in business at Norwich, where his son William Jackson was born in 1785. Lydia Vincent, Joseph Hooker’s wife, claims special notice for her artistic heritage. George Vincent,{Note 6} her cousin, studied under ‘Old Crome’ with Cotman {Note 7} and J. B. Crome, and during his short career, was one of the lights of the Norwich School. Lydia’s sister had married William Jackson of Canterbury-indeed Jacksons and Vincents intermarried for several generations and their only son was godfather to his cousin William Jackson Hooker, to whom he afterwards left the Jackson property.

The Vincent strain is responsible for Joseph Hooker’s great feeling for art. The power of draughtsmanship came also from the Cotmans through his mother, Maria Turner, for her grandmother (Dawson Turner’s mother) was Elizabeth Cotman, but the faculty thus transmitted was that of the copyist rather than the art-lover.

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William Jackson Hooker, inheriting love of the garden and books from his father, of art from his mother, was one of those who came into the world with the true spirit of the naturalist, a characteristic he transmitted in full measure to his son. Like all such, his love for the outdoor world took him into field and wood and intimacy with the life of nature; in his school-days he collected insects and flowers and read books on natural history, and early got to know the flowers and mosses, the liverworts and lichens and freshwater algae round his home in the heart of that county which possesses two-thirds of the species of British plants. No sordid cares, such as often overshadow a young man’s future, prevented him from indulging his bent; for at the age of four he inherited a competency from his cousin-godfather, William Jackson of Canterbury, and as he grew up, he resolved to devote himself to travel and natural history. A keen sportsman, he made a fine collection of the birds of Norfolk; close relations with Kirby and Spence {Note 8} and Alexander Macleay {Note 9} spurred his pursuit of entomology.

His science and his scientific drawing both won early notice. When he was twenty he discovered, near Norwich, a species of moss (Buxbaumia aphylla) previously unknown in Britain; and three years later Sir J. E. Smith, in dedicating to him the genus Hookeria, made special mention of his illustrations of Dawson Turner’s Fuci and of the difficult genus Jungermannia. The latter genus, be it noted, was an especial favourite of his. He published a monograph on the British Jungermanniae in 1816, and, as will be seen hereafter, his son, finding any on his travels, never fails to mention the fact in his letters home. In his earlier days, William Hooker travelled afield botanising in Scotland and the Isles, no slight undertaking in 1807 and 1808; and in 1809 made his celebrated voyage to Iceland, where he witnessed a bloodless revolution (see p. 108), and on his homeward way lost his collections and all but lost his life by the burning of his ship. But he was unable to carry out his wider plans of visiting Ceylon and Java, S. Africa and Brazil, though he visited France, where he made acquaintance with the great botanists in Paris and Switzerland, a centre of botanical and geological interest.

In 1815 he married Maria, the eldest daughter of his friend Dawson Turner, and at his father-in-law’s advice, embarked his remaining fortune in a brewery, in which the Turners and Pagets were interested. This promised to recoup the loss of large sums which he had sunk in the bottomless depths of the Spanish Funds. It was an enterprise, however, for which his aptitudes were little suited, and the business went steadily down. But this loss of fortune was the beginning of his greater career. Had the friendly alliance of Hooker, Turner, and Paget prospered, he would have remained an amateur-if a distinguished amateur-in science, and would never have achieved the special eminence which was to shape his son’s career and be continued in it. A growing family and diminishing revenue made him look out for some botanical post that should both give scope to his special powers and bring in an income. Through the influence of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, {Note 10} botanist, explorer, and chief power in the official world of English science, he was appointed by the Crown in 1820 to the newly founded Chair of Botany in Glasgow, in succession to Dr. Graham, {Note 11} who, after occupying it a couple of years from its foundation, had been appointed to Edinburgh.

Here Sir William met with immediate and striking success. He established a flourishing school of botany; raised the infant botanical garden to the front rank, supplying it and his herbarium with the products of every country with which the trading community of Glasgow was in touch. The experience gathered in Glasgow prepared his signal success in after years at Kew. Here, therefore, his sons grew up in an atmosphere of natural science, whether class-work or field-work, of long-drawn and unceasing industry, of contact with distinguished workers in natural history in general and botany in particular.

The Professor [writes Prof. F. O. Bower in his Commemorative Oration] had established himself in Woodside Crescent, conveniently near to the garden, and doubtless his little son was familiar with it and its contents from childhood. He grew up in an atmosphere surcharged with the very science he was to do so much to advance. His father’s home was the scene of manifold activities. It housed a rapidly growing private herbarium and museum. It was there that the drawings were made to illustrate the amazing stream of descriptive works which Sir William was then producing. New species must have been almost daily under examination, often as living specimens. Between the garden and the house the boy must have witnessed constantly, during the most receptive years of childhood, the working of an establishment that was at that time without its equal in this country, or probably in any other. The eye and memory will have been trained almost unconsciously. A knowledge of plants would be acquired as a natural consequence of the surroundings, and without effort entailed by study in later years. Sir Joseph once said to me: ‘You young men do not know your plants.’ Certainly we did not in the way that he knew them. Few have ever known, few ever will know them in that way. Such knowledge comes only from growing up with them from earliest childhood, as he did.

The influence of Sir William’s teaching, with its personal stimulus, its wealth of illustration by specimens and diagrams, its fostering of accurate observation and its botanising excursions, is well described in his son’s own words taken from the address delivered at the opening of the Botanical Laboratory in Glasgow 1901. We see the boy sharing in these excursions long before he was a regular student at his father’s lectures.

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. But he had resources that enabled him to overcome all obstacles-familiarity with his subject, devotion to its study, energy, eloquence, a commanding presence with urbanity of manners, and, above all, the art of making the student love the science he taught. But his energies were not confined to lecturing. Feeling the want of a manual on the Scottish Flora to put into the students’ hands, he published, in time for use in his second course, the ‘Flora Scotica,’ in two volumes, the outcome mainly of his earlier Scottish expeditions; and in readiness for his third course he produced, at his own cost, and from drawings made by himself, an oblong folio of twenty-one lithographed plates, with descriptions of the organs, etc., of upwards of three hundred plants. A copy of this work was placed before every two students in the class during that portion of the day’s lecture which was devoted to the analysis of plants, obtained from the garden and placed in the students’ hands for this purpose. I should mention that every student was expected to provide himself with a pocket lens, knife, and pair of forceps, aided with which he followed the demonstrations of the professor. I think it may fairly be said that these early lectures heralded the dawn of scientific botanical teaching in Glasgow University.

Another claim upon the professor’s energies was due to the fact that the botanical class was in a great measure ancillary to that of Materia medica, a practical knowledge of which latter subject was at that time required of candidates for a medical degree, diploma, or licence by, I believe, all the examining bodies in the United Kingdom.

Now the Glasgow students of botany were, with a few exceptions, preparing themselves for the medical profession, and a considerable proportion of them at that time looked forward to service in the army, navy, India, and the colonies, where they would be thrown on their own resources for ascertaining the quality of their drugs, which had either undergone a long voyage from England or had to be replaced by such substitutes as the practitioner’s knowledge of botany might enable him to discover. The professor hence devoted much time to teaching the botanical characters of the principal medical and economic plants. To this end he made large coloured drawings of them in flower, fruit, etc., which were hung in the class-room when the natural orders to which they belonged were being demonstrated, and he passed round dried specimens of them taken from his herbarium, or living ones from the garden when they were to be had, together with samples of the drugs or other products which they yielded.

It remains to allude to the class excursions, which have always been, and still happily are, a prominent feature of the botanical teaching in the Scottish Universities. Of these there were three: two, on Saturdays, were habitually to Campsie Glen and Bowling Bay respectively. The third, which was eagerly looked forward to by the most ardent of the students, took place at the end of June. It was to some good botanising ground in the Western Highlands. As many as thirty students have taken part in these larger excursions, each provided with as small a kit as possible, a vasculum, and apparatus for drying plants. They were often accompanied by students from Edinburgh, and sometimes by eminent botanists, British and foreign. In those days there were few inns in the Western Highlands, and fewer coaches, and the roads were bad. On one of any father’s first excursions he provided a marquee to hold the party, which was transported in a Dutch wagon drawn by a Highland pony; and for supplies the party depended on the flocks and fowls of the cottagers. On the first excursion on which I was taken, when a boy, to Loch Lomond, there was no inn at Tarbet, and we all slept there in our clothes, on heather spread on the floor of a cottage - on another occasion when I was allowed to join the party. (more for fishing than for botanising) on an excursion to Kilhn, we walked the whole way from the head of Loch Lomond along the old military road made in the previous century by General Wade, eulogised in the well known distich:

If you’d seen these roads before they were made,
You’d have lift up your hands and blessed General Wade.

If I were asked what I regarded as of most importance to the student in the manner of my father’s teaching as sketched above, I would answer that it taught the art of exact observation and reasoning therefrom, a schooling of inestimable value for the medical man, and one that is given in no other profession, but which ought to come, in this country, as it does in Germany, early in the education of every child. I have met many of my father’s pupils abroad, in India, and the colonies, who have told me that these botanical lectures gave them the first ideas they had ever entertained of there being a natural classification of the members of the vegetable kingdom. Then with regard to the results, in a botanical point of view, the magnetism of the lecturer and the interest of the subject imbued many of his pupils with a love of science that proved permanent and fruitful. They made observations and collections for their quondam professor in the temperate or tropical climates of both hemispheres, some of them throughout their lives, which have very largely contributed to a knowledge of the flora and vegetable resources of the globe.

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Not only was Sir William Hooker a great teacher and administrator, but a most prolific writer. His writings were unequalled in the number and accuracy of the plates with which they were illustrated. The number of these his son estimated at 8000, of which 1800 were from his own drawings. His systematic work covered a wide range, and, apart from its intrinsic value, has a peculiar interest here in its relation to the systematic work of his son. His publications on the plants of Parry’s and Sabine’s {Note 12} Arctic voyages and on the botany of Beechey’s voyage to Behring Strait, the Pacific, and China, compare with his son’s Antarctic and Australian work. His ‘Flora Boreali-Americana,’ his ‘British Flora,’ his Niger Flora ‘are paralleled by work in the same fields. His ten books on ferns-for he was the leading pteridologist of his time-prelude Joseph Hooker’s interest in the cryptogams, while the great series of the ‘Icones Plantarum,’ begun in 1837 to illustrate new and rare plants selected from the author’s herbarium, which later became the nucleus of the great Kew Herbarium, was continued under his son and successor at Kew, thanks to the bequest left for this purpose by Bentham.

For the most part this work of his was a labour of love, often involving financial responsibility as well. Generous to others, and enthusiastic for his work, he thought little of his own interests in comparison with the scientific privileges offered by the position at Kew. He drew upon his private means, not only for his books, but for the ceaseless succession of botanical magazines of which he undertook the editorship, in order to secure a channel for recording the immense variety of new facts that came before him as director of large and expanding botanical gardens, facts needing to be set on record, though too scattered and disconnected for publication in anything but a ‘miscellany.’

Joseph Hooker’s mother, Maria Turner, brought another strongly marked strain of character and capacity into his inheritance. She was an accomplished woman, who not only shared her husband’s tastes, but by her well-cultivated gifts was able to enter into his pursuits. Their outlook on life was similar, for both had been bred in the evangelical tradition, which she perhaps preserved the more rigidly. Like him, she had a love for music and art, and a keen interest in the sciences affected by her father, especially botany. She was widely read, and wrote with a facile pen steeped in all the copious rotundity of the Johnsonian school. From the Turner side, no doubt, she transmitted something of the business faculty that was to stand her son in good stead when he came to deal with men and affairs.

Similarity of tastes and interests had first drawn together Dawson Turner and W. J. Hooker. The younger man was speedily impressed by the great vigour and strong character of the elder, admiring his practicality the more for being himself careless of selfish interests in the enthusiasm of his pursuits. For the rest of his life Dawson Turner became his scientific friend, his intimate correspondent, his business mentor. Dawson Turner, indeed, won well-deserved success alike as banker, author, botanist, and archaeologist. His mother, Elizabeth Cotman, brought him an artistic heritage. On his father’s side, business and scholarship had been grafted upon a solid yeoman stock of Norfolk. For nearly two and a half centuries since the first Turner bought his modest acres at Kennington in 1570, these passed from father to son.

At the end of the seventeenth century, a younger son, Francis (1681-1719), was bred to the law, and settled in Yarmouth, where he married the daughter of the Town Clerk, Thomas Godfrey, and with obvious propriety succeeded to his office in 1710.

His only son was another Francis, who took Orders, married Sarah Dawson, and had four sons: (1) Francis, an eminent surgeon; (2) Joseph, who was Senior Wrangler in 1768, then Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and ultimately Dean of Norwich; (3) Richard, who, through the influence of his brother the Dean, became incumbent of Great Yarmouth; and (4) James, who became the resident partner in the firm of Gurney & Co. when they opened a branch of their Norwich bank at Great Yarmouth.

This James Turner married, as has been mentioned, Elizabeth Cotman, and gave his mother’s family name to his son Dawson (b. 1775).

Dawson Turner, as might be expected, went to Pembroke College, where his uncle was Master; but in his second year his father died, and he had to leave the University and take his place at the bank. But business did not exclude letters. As banker and author he was a forerunner of Grote and Bagehot and Lubbock. His library, his collection of autographs, his small but choice gallery of pictures, were all notable.

As early as 1797 he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and later, of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society.{Note 13}

Through the Turner connexion the Hookers gained several interesting cousinships-notably with the Palgrave family. Dawson Turner married Mary Palgrave (1774-1850), second daughter of William Palgrave, of Coltishall, and Elizabeth Thirkettle. Her younger sister, Anne Palgrave (1777-1872), married Edward Rigby, M.D., of Coltishall. Three of the Rigby daughters were married in Esthonia: Anne (1804-69) to George de Wahl, Maria Justina (1808-89) to Baron Robert de Rosen, Gertrude (1813-59) to Theophile de Rosen; Gertrude’s daughter, again, in 1860 married General Manderstjerna, and the rest of her children married and remained in Russia. These second cousins of his welcomed Joseph Hooker on his visit to St. Petersburg in 1869.

Another Rigby daughter, Elizabeth (1809-93), married Sir Charles Eastlake, P.R.A. She was a close and lifelong friend of her cousin Joseph. Matilda, the eighth child and youngest of the Rigbys, married James Smith. Their daughter, Matilda, is the skilful botanical artist who succeeded Walter Fitch as illustrator at Kew.

Dawson Turner’s eldest daughter, as we have seen, married W. J. Hooker. His second daughter, Elizabeth, married that Francis Cohen who on his marriage assumed the name of Palgrave with the consent of her uncles, the two surviving sons of William Palgrave, and last male representatives of the family.

Of Elizabeth’s children Sir Francis Palgrave became Keeper of the Records. One of his sons, Francis Turner Palgrave, is in perpetual memory as editor of the Golden Treasury; another was William Gifford Palgrave, the famous traveller in the East; another, Sir R. H. Inglis Palgrave, banker and writer on financial subjects; and the fourth, Sir Reginald Palgrave, Clerk to the House of Commons. To all these first cousins Joseph Hooker was warmly attached, and with Inglis Palgrave especially, who constantly advised him on business matters, he kept up a lifelong correspondence, albeit a correspondence which seldom lends itself to quotation for general purposes.

Of the rest of the Turner family Harriett (1806-69) was the author of I Letters from Holland.’ She married, 1830, Rev. John Gunn, President of the Geological Society, Norwich.

Hannah Sarah (1808-82) made sixty portraits from drawings on stone, and fifty-one drawings for the ‘Outlines in Lithography ‘for private circulation. She married, 1839, Thomas Brightwen of Great Yarmouth.

Eleanor Jane (1811-95) was an accomplished classical scholar. She married, 1836, Rev. Wm. Jacobson, D.D., Bishop of Chester.

Gurney (1813-48) married, 1844, Mary Anne Hamilton. Dawson William (1815-85) Headmaster of the Royal Institution, Liverpool, married Ophelia Dixon.

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The atmosphere in which the young Hookers grew up was one not only of strenuous work, but also of a certain austerity m moral and religious training, recalling the Puritan trend of their forbears. In daily example they saw that their father rose early, worked late, and seldom went out to entertainments. Like his wife, he was, as has been said, a strong Evangelical, seeing the hand of an overruling providence in every turn of events, and accepting bereavements, or the prospect of them, with a pious resignation coloured by the warm conviction of future reunion. In the letters of both husband and wife, hopes for the future are regularly expressed with the pious qualification ‘if God wills,’ and present sorrows borne as ‘the will of God.’ Speculative thought beyond evangelical limits had no part in this household; they and theirs should uphold their own observances boldly before ‘the scoffer and the sceptic.’ The children were brought up simply, strictly, without indulgence-it seems, indeed, with some measure of rigidity-to be Godfearing, honourable, hardworking members of their society. If the outlook was in some respects narrow, compensation lay in the intellectual activities that found scope in varied scientific pursuits, in drawing and some music, and intercourse with men distinguished in science and travel. There is an obvious danger of young folk becoming priggish and didactic under such conditions, which tend to isolate them from the ordinary boys and girls of their world and to make them despise the thoughtless amusements and unfruitful occupations of their fellows; the saving salt for the young Hookers lay in their real enthusiasm for living pursuits and the freshness of their interests.

The family was five in number: William Dawson, Joseph’s senior by fifteen months (b. April 4, 1816, d. January 1, 1840); Joseph Dalton, b. June 30, 1817; Maria, b. May 8, 1819; Elizabeth, b. November 15, 1820; and Mary Harriette, b. October 2, 1825, who died of consumption on June 19, 1841.

References to these early days are scattered and fragmentary. It is very clear that a strain of delicacy ran through the family, which showed itself in susceptibility to consumption. Joseph as an infant was ‘croaky Joe,’ with a tendency to cough and croupy hoarseness; William, shortly after his early marriage, was threatened with the disease, and was therefore sent to make a home and a medical career in Jamaica, where he was carried off by yellow fever, January 1, 1840. Then came nearly two years’ painful anxiety over the two youngest sisters, who were at school in London under Mrs. Teed, at Little Campden House. A few weeks after Joseph set sail in the Erebus, in the autumn of 1839, Elizabeth fell ill, and had to winter at Hastings under the care of a great-aunt, Mrs. Walford Taylor, and to undergo a course of treatment in the next summer under Dr. Jephson at Leamington, where she was joined by Mary Harriette at the beginning of the holidays in July. Worse followed. On reaching Glasgow, Elizabeth fell back; Mary was found to be very ill. With some difficulty they were taken to Jersey at the end of September. Lady Hooker nursed them with the help of her capable and devoted eldest daughter; after much suffering, Elizabeth recovered, Mary Harriette slowly faded away.

Brothers and sisters were warmly attached to one another. Joseph’s affections were not spread afield; they were the more intense for being concentrated upon his family circle-’the seven persons I really love ‘-and a few other friends. Writing home from the Antarctic after receiving the news of his brother’s and sister’s death, he accuses himself of the fault of selfishness. More justly, perhaps, he would have used the word self-centred; he always has the full sympathy of his correspondents, and his own letters show abundant care for those dear to him.

The home regime was sufficiently firm. Sir William, courtly, handsome, attractive, perhaps laid weight mainly on the duty of pure motive and honourable conduct; Lady Hooker was also a strict disciplinarian and a stickler for the forms of reverence which the manners of her young days demanded of children for their parents. When Joseph, for instance, came in from school after a long and tiring walk home, he must present himself to his mother, but was not allowed to sit down in her presence without permission, and was kept standing until it was clear that discipline had conquered inclination.

In their boyish days, William, the firstborn, was clearly the mother’s favourite. He was the more clever, lively, and forthcoming. In Lady Hooker’s letters to her father, Dawson Turner, Joseph as a rule appears rather as the plodder without his brother’s brilliancy. William, however, with all his quickness and cleverness, had a vein of instability. The contrast between the brothers in the matter of perseverance shows itself from the first, and Joseph’s determination to master whatever he undertook calls forth his mother’s just praise. Later, William made a large collection of birds, while Joseph collected insects and plants. William won his literary spurs at one-and-twenty by printing for private circulation his ‘Notes on Norway,’ the account of a trip to Scandinavia; while Joseph, in the same year, first appeared in print with the description of three new mosses from the Himalaya in the ‘Icones Plantarum’ (ii. 194).

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The boys went to Glasgow High School, where they received the old-fashioned, liberal, Scottish education-an education that culminates in the Arts’ degree for proficiency in Latin and Greek, mathematics, logic and English literature, and moral philosophy. In after life Hooker thought the moral philosophy course had been of little value to him; his classical studies, however, were not lost even from an utilitarian point of view, and he remained always able to write Latin easily.

Sir William and Lady Hooker’s letters to Dawson Turner afford a few glimpses into the boys’ school-days. Thus Lady Hooker writes on June 9, 1824, after a description of Willy’s lessons-to our great astonishment that little boys of seven and eight should attend a college lecture on botany:

He and Joseph accompany their father, with Frank and Robert, {Note 14} to the lecture every morning. It is fine exercise for them, and they return to breakfast at half-past nine o’clock, as hungry almost as my sisters and brothers used to be. I think that Joseph would be the child to please you in his learning. He is extremely industrious, though not very clever. Willy can learn the faster if he chooses, but while his elder brother sets his very heart against his lessons, Joseph bends all his soul and spirit to the task before him.

And on December 21, 1824, she hopes that the grandfather’s note accompanying a present will have a stimulating effect on the grandson who so little inherits his disposition; for

Willy is sadly negligent with regard to his lessons, especially his Latin ones. If we could but inspire him with a little emulation he would make great progress, for when any sufficient inducement occurs, he learns remarkably quickly and far outstrips his brother; but generally he is content to let Joseph get before him; and though we caress the latter and slight Willy [the modern mother, we hope, does not adopt this method of arousing emulation], yet William is not in the least jealous, but loves his brother as dearly as if he were not his superior.

Education, indeed, wore a stern face in those days. Poor Willy!

I wish that I could tell you that your eldest grandson had inherited from his grandsire a little taste for learning languages. But ever since we returned from Yarmouth, the lessons, especially those in Latin, have been a perpetual source of sorrow both to the teacher and to the teachee (I wish I could say to the learner). Writing and arithmetic are the only departments of his education in which Willy has made any progress. But during the last ten days, a new light has seemed to dawn upon the child’s mind. [He has made many good resolutions, couched in picturesque scriptural phrases.] We shall see how long they will last, but you may be sure that we bestow all manner of caresses and encouragement upon him. Indeed, we are ourselves happy in an opportunity to show a little kindness towards the poor child, who has lately received from us nothing but reproof and punishment.

Again, in 1828, Joseph being just eleven, his father writes

I wish you could bring the dear boy Gurney with you, and let him go to Killin in June with me and see Launden Cameron and climb the Breadalbane mountains. . . . Last Year I took Willy the same route, and this year I think of taking both him and Joseph. [Gurney and Dawson, by the way, Dawson Turner’s sons, were almost of an age with William Hooker, being but three years and one year older respectively, and so more like cousins than uncles to the boys.]

In 1829: They make very fair progress with their tutor (who coached them in Latin) and are much more inclined to like lessons than they used to be.

1829: The boys beg to thank you for your kind present of ‘The Boys’ Own Book’; it is seldom out of their hands during playtime.

In after life Sir Joseph often talked of how he loved this book, and read it and consulted it.

In 1831 comes the first mention of their repeated stay at Helensburgh so that the children may have country air and liberty. Burnside was a delightful memory; but even more beloved was Invereck, and it became their country home in 1837. Indeed, when it came into the market in the late seventies, Hooker would have bought it had it not been so far from Kew.

As at thirteen, ‘Joseph is becoming a zealous botanist,’ so at fifteen, ‘Joseph is contented and happy at home, and studying Orchideae most zealously.’

In 1832, when the boys were sixteen and fifteen respectively, they entered Glasgow University, with four sets of lectures each, all in Latin and Greek for Joseph.

Joseph has paid a good deal of attention to collecting and drawing insects, though he has not nearly so much natural ability for sketching as his brother has. Mrs. Lyell sent Joseph a very nice specimen box, stored with four or five dozen of the rarer insects found near Kinnordy.

The Lyells of Kinnordy were to play a large part in Hooker’s life. Charles Lyell, the elder, {Note 15} was a botanist of distinction and an old friend of Sir William’s; and his son was that greatest of geologists who was to be the early inspirer of Darwin and his lifelong friend together with Hooker.

Later in the same year, 1832

Joseph is in the senior Latin and senior Greek, and next year will take logic and mathematics along with his brother. William continues ardently devoted to ornithology, and Joseph to botany and entomology. The latter is already a fair British botanist and has a tolerable herbarium, very much of his own collecting. But the orchideae are his great favourites, and he has an eye for them, and a memory too for their names, which often surprises me. Had he time for it he would already be more useful to me than Mr. Klotzsch [his assistant].{Note 16}

The removal to a new house in Glasgow, at Woodside Crescent, ‘spirited up’ the family to an access of tidying, and ‘Joseph has taken in hand to arrange all his father’s duplicate plants, selecting among them for his own collection, and he has been pursuing this occupation with much diligence for some weeks.’

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Next year, Joseph being sixteen, his father declines an invitation for him to go to the Dawson Turners’ at Yarmouth, saying, ‘the expense is very considerable for a lad who is scarcely old enough to derive permanent advantage from such a journey; and both he and his brother have now entered upon studies which can scarcely with propriety be interrupted.’ The permanent advantage of studying his grandfather’s collections would doubtless come later, when he should be further advanced in his regular botanical work.

A little later Sir William sends his father-in-law a parcel; in which is enclosed a small box of insects which Joseph is ‘very desirous of transmitting to Mr. Paget.’ {Note 17}

The same entomological enthusiasm inspires two early letters to Dr. Harvey, {Note 18} who had sent him the first part of Stephens’ ‘Entomology’ with some specimens. As his own collection is not yet very well supplied-Scotland not being a country where insects abound-he sends, in default of a better return; some German plants given him by Mr. Klotzsch (December 3, 1833).

And again on December 11, 1835, when Dr. Harvey had promised to collect insects for him at the Cape, he sends instructions as to a new method of preserving specimens in hot climates, and continues

your account of the country fills me with an ardent desire to go there; however, I suppose I must be content to live on that unnourishing diet hope for some years to come. I should give a great deal to be present at the opening of the boxes of insects the travellers from the interior bring down, they must bring some splendid things; pray, what becomes of them 2

William is particularly obliged for your anxiety about procuring birds, and, believe me, I am more eaten up with entomological zeal than ever; who knows but I may, ere I die, publish an Entomologia Capensis? That poor unfortunate Stephens is determined to go on to the end with his invaluable work; he cannot now, I hear, afford to keep his wife, a salutary lesson to all not to marry, who want to devote their time to Nat. Hist.

Of Joseph’s University work Sir William writes

William and Joseph have entered upon their College duties of the present session apparently with much satisfaction. They both take Mathematics and Moral Philosophy. Joseph in addition attends the private Greek class, and William, Surgery.

The following letter from Lady Hooker may be quoted at length for the light it throws on the family’s work and successes. Lady Hooker, it will be observed, cultivated a sub-Johnsonian style; or perhaps more truly reflected that of the Swan of Lichfield, itself a reflection from the authentic Johnson.

‘Your son’ is an affectionate trope for son-in-law, and his ‘honors ‘mean that he is now created Sir William, Knight of Hanover, an order which became extinct with the separation of Hanover from the British Crown.

Saturday, May 7, 1836.

Many thanks for your affectionate congratulations on your son’s honors and your grandsons’ prizes, on the industry of the latter, I should rather say. The hope of pleasing their relations and gaining their good opinion, goes so far with both William and Joseph (especially the former), and they value so highly (as they ought to do) your favor and commendation, that I feel particularly gratified at your having taken the trouble of writing to them upon this occasion. Your present to them is quite too munificent, as perhaps they felt,-for Joseph immediately remarked he hoped his grandfather was very rich, or he should not like to take so much money from him. They would, I am sure, gladly add a few lines to thank you, in their own hand-writing, but their father and I have just left them at Helensburgh, where they will spend the Sunday with their grandpapa and sisters, returning home early on Monday morning. A fortnight ago, Joseph walked 24 miles—from Helensburgh to Glasgow—rather than wait for the steamer next morning, by which delay he would have missed a lecture. Willie has gone to-day to fish in Loch Lomond,—he started at 3 o’clock this morning Joseph has been equally earnestly employed in turning over stones and hunting in the rejectament of the sea for beetles. His collection of insects is becoming considerable, he devotes every spare minute to it, and has opened a correspondence with several entomologists, both British and foreign. We sent you a Glasgow newspaper last Tuesday, which mentioned the prizes: in the Natural Philosophy Class, where Joseph gained one prize and worked for three, he was the youngest student of all, and much younger than the majority of those who attend the Anatomical Lectures, where he carried off the single prize which alone is given, among a class often consisting of more than a hundred individuals. These circumstances, which cannot be publicly known, ought yet to be thankfully taken into account by us, when calculating the amount of his labour and of the success which has crowned that labour. I could not help hoping that the dear boy had caught a shred of his grandfather’s mantle (far be it from me, by this awkward and tattered simile, however, to imply that the garment is either worn out or cast aside by the honored wearer) when I saw him, earnestly and unprompted during his papa’s absence, undertake the task of cataloguing every book in the house. All the names were written down and arranged alphabetically, and part of the fair index was made before his father returned.

Of his tastes and education, Joseph himself wrote later, towards the end of the Antarctic voyage, to his aunt, Mary Turner. The letter, a copy probably touched up by his mother, is dated April 18, 1843.

You remind me of the times when we used to sit in the study (where probably you now are and where this note may reach you some two months hence) reading Tacitus: at least you and my grandfather reading it and I looking on.

Alas ! I never had much taste for Latin and Greek, or any of the dead languages; and (except that I should have the satisfaction of knowing that my father’s money was not so much thrown away) I greatly doubt if my having been a good scholar would give me now so much pleasure as you might imagine. What I do really regret is the little attention I paid to Ancient and especially to Modern History. If half the time spent on the Classics had been devoted to those subjects, the knowledge of them would prove a far more agreeable companion than Horace, Virgil or even Homer. Do not think I underrate those attainments, which alone make a man the perfect gentleman; but I had no taste for them, though ample time and opportunity for all. As it is, I sometimes attempt to rub them up, but I enjoy nothing so much as Hume and Smollett. {Note 19} This mainly arises from the writers’ bringing associations, connected with different parts of my native land, and of scenes, though perhaps only scampered through in a Mail Coach, which my memory, very retentive of localities, enables me to revisit, along with the heroes of my Author. A love of poetry is also a sad deficiency in me, for you cannot suppose that I should learn to appreciate it by being crammed with stanzas of Marmion, not amid Castles and Groves, but in a school of 100 boys. Crabbe’s Poems are my favorites (laugh at me if you will), because I can go with him everywhere. As for Thomson, ‘void of rhyme as well as reason,’, he is quite too lackadaisical for me. To the Southward, in bad weather, I used to spend a great deal of time in reading, chiefly books on Scientific subjects, which are of most importance to me now that I have to work for my bread.

Of French he early acquired a working knowledge, improving it greatly in the winter of 1844-5, before his journey to Paris, by dint of lessons and conversation with M. Planchon, his father’s assistant at Kew. With German, also, he was conversant enough to tackle German books on botany; but it was a labour to him. Hence the zest of his repartee to Darwin, of whom it is told (‘Life,’ i. 126): ‘When he began German long ago, he boasted of the fact (as he used to tell) to Sir J. Hooker, who replied: “Ah, my dear fellow, that’s nothing; I’ve begun it many times.” ‘

Among his contemporaries he neither courted popularity nor was constitutionally fitted to practise the arts of popularity. Indeed, he suffered from a nervous irritability of the heart which from his school-days brought on palpitation when he stood up to construe in class. And although he tried to overcome this by joining his college debating society and getting up speeches carefully beforehand, success was denied him. Even in later life the delivery of an address meant a strain which brought on physical nausea and severe nervous reaction. As he grew up, he went far afield on his botanical expeditions. On September 2, 1836, Sir William, sending a belated acceptance of an invitation for Joseph to visit his grandfather, writes: ‘I only returned from a Highland tour with Dr. Graham, Mr. Wilson {Note 20} and Joseph last Saturday. The latter had been away some weeks with Mr. Wilson amongst the Aberdeenshire mountains, and I could not communicate with him but by ferreting him out in person, which I did, and found him and Wilson at the old hovel at the foot of Ben Lomond, where they were nearly a week.’

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On his way to Yarmouth, he stays at Liverpool with Mr. Melly, a collector of beetles, among whose specimens he sees the Goliathi, which he afterwards collected himself in India; and at Manchester with Mr. Glover, {Note 21} possessor of a less valuable collection; at each city visiting the Museum and Botanical Gardens. The Manchester Gardens are ‘the finest I ever saw; finer, I think, than Edinburgh, though not, certainly, so good a collection of plants.’

Then at Hull he stays with William Spence, joint author with William Kirby (a Norwich man) of the famous ‘Introduction to Entomology,’ examining his rich collection and twice going out entomologising with him.

At Yarmouth he works keenly in his grandfather’s and Miss Hutchins’ herbaria; and as a result asks his father to re-examine his own specimens of a certain moss (Bryum triquetrum) in order to correct what he feels sure is a wrong ascription of a specimen of his grandfather’s. So, too, the latter has just received five specimens of the narrow-leaved lungwort (Pulmonaria angustifolia). Joseph, examining these, concludes that it is one and the same with our common lungwort (P. officinalis), but that Linnaeus’ P. o f officinalis is not a British plant.

From his visit to Yarmouth he returned on November 8, and on the 10th his father writes:

I need hardly tell you that the boy has enjoyed his visit much and seems really grateful for the privileges he has enjoyed, especially under your roof. He is quite disposed to work at the classes, and set out yesterday morning before breakfast to enter them. He takes Surgery, Chemistry, Materia medica, Anatomical demonstrations, and occasionally the dissecting-room. He is gone to-day to endeavour to arrange with Mr. Arnott {Note 22} to give him two hours a day at Latin, as you kindly suggested. Thus you see his time will be fully occupied, and he can only reckon on a holiday now and then to allow him to devote some attention to naturalist pursuits.

Next summer we find him geologising, in Arran, with his friend Thomas Thomson.{Note 23}. And to go forward a year, on January 9, 1839, Sir William tells Dawson Turner:

When I went to bed at a late hour last night I left him writing an answer to you, and indeed he may, with a clear conscience, give a good account of himself for the last three or four weeks, especially as relates to his botanical pursuits. He has worked at plants with a degree of steadiness and ardour that has been most gratifying, and it appears that his industry is likely to meet with its reward . . . [i.e. in selection for the Antarctic Expedition].

Three letters of August and September 1838, from the young Hooker to his father, tell how he went with Dr. Graham on a botanising trip in Ireland (August 2-18); to the British Association Meeting at Newcastle (21-30); and then proceeded to visit Dr. Richardson {Note 24} at Haslar (September 1-4), when the latter was to take stock of him, so to say, before recommending him for the Antarctic Expedition.

Details of travelling in those days have a curious interest in comparison with to-day. Thus, leaving Dublin

at 4 P.M., started in a track-boat for Ballinasloe, where we were met by a Biancini car, which took us to Galway by 8 P.M. on Friday night; the car and track-boat were of the same company, and we went the whole excursion, 140 miles, for 18s. each, including a dinner and a breakfast; this, however, was the only cheap travelling experienced.

To get from Newcastle to Portsmouth he was advised

to take the coach from Newcastle to London at 9 A.M. on Thursday, which I did for £2. I went the whole distance, including coachmen and eating, for £3. I travelled all night, and arrived in London on Friday night, at 8 P.M. A coach was then starting for Portsmouth, in which I took a place, 14s., and arrived here on Saturday at 8 A.M.

A few more passages may be quoted.

Galway is a horrible town with 30,000 inhabitants, filthy in the extreme, without a single good building in it; the whole neighbourhood is limestone, and the fields are all covered with large stones which are turned into walls of the worst description.

Thursday, botanised about Cliffden, rained tremendously all day; went to Mr. D’Arley’s at Cliffden Castle. Mr. D. is a very nice gentleman, hospitable in the extreme, who regretted his inability to take in our party of 12. He is tremendously in debt, but no creditor can go to the expense of arresting him, for the Connemara boys, with whom he is a great favorite, will allow no such intruder near Cliffden Castle. The last person who tried was an Inn-keeper here, but the inhabitants, guessing his intention, would not let his servant enter the village, but beat him unmercifully and sent him off. The police force were collected, who took them, and the malefactors are now lying in Galway jail for the next assizes.

True to his careful upbringing, he is ever punctilious in recording his Sunday observances.

[At Galway] we went to Church twice, and I once to the Roman Catholic chapel besides, with which I was much disgusted; the gallery: was well filled with respectable persons, but the body of the Church was crammed with inattentive hearers covered with rags or nearly naked. The English services were good, but the congregations wretched. [Next week, at Killery] for some reason or other no service was performed, nor was there a Church nearer than 20 miles.

It was not a very profitable excursion in its results, albeit he is most careful in his expenditure.

I have regretted the expense, just £10, extremely, as except getting a good stock of the above-mentioned plants, nothing has been done but making as many sketches as I could by waiting behind the party; these I have had no time to finish at all. Of plants I have about 3000 specimens, as far, as I can count, all dried as well as I could; this I say with conscience, and as I changed the papers every night, when possible, I am sure you will be pleased. . . . Mosses are extremely scarce here; I think one is, however, the Hymenostoma rutilans, as far as I can judge without a microscope; if so it be, a good discovery and the only one; it was very sparing in a wood near Galway, at the foot of a tree on the ground; it is very minute and there are only three or four capsules; the other Mosses you will see are some of them very common and only gathered for my own examination.

Now, my dear papa, such is the outline of the excursion which you were kind enough to allow me to join, solely, as it has turned out, for any own gratification. I have enjoyed it extremely, and feel twice as strong as when I left Glasgow; I hope the remainder of it, and especially the interview with Dr. Richardson, will be more profitable to myself. . . .

Excuse this hasty letter, it is now 3 A.M., and we start to-morrow morning. I am very sleepy, the fleas in Connemara keeping me awake the whole night sometimes.

As to the British Association, the Newcastle meeting of 1838 was his first. It was said to outshine in splendour any former meeting; and he confessed to his grandfather that with all its obvious utility as a common meeting-ground, and its encouragement to the non-scientific who were temporarily proud to be seen with a hammer or vasculum, ‘the scientific department fell far behind the amusement and eating.’ One notes the number of scientific men he either knew already or was introduced to; the quaint appearance of Dr. Richardson in the Natural History section, as he sat on the left of the Chair, and read the report of the previous day’s proceedings,—

being fully attired in a Dumfries Tartan of broad check and a shooting coat of the same. . . . There were not above 50 people in the room, and almost no ladies; those few who were there had come in by accident, and I was afterwards much surprised to hear that ladies were precluded from attending this section of Botany and Zoology on account of the nature of some of the papers belonging to the latter division, [for which, in his judgment, there was not the least occasion].

[On the 24th.] The Medical section was wretched; when I went in Dr. Bowring {Note 25} was reading a violently radical paper condemning Quarantine laws and the Government which allows them.

On the 27th, at the Anniversary dinner of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle,

the Bishop of Carlisle was in the Chair and proposed several toasts, among others the Universities of Great Britain, with a long speech, which Buckland {Note 26} answered to; but neither of them seemed to remember that there was such a place as Glasgow, or Edinburgh either, which much offended me and T. Thomson; I thought it an especial bad compliment to Dr. Graham, who was sitting at the same table as the speakers.

The botanist in him was also up in arms next day at a public meeting, when it was resolved that a Botanical Garden be established in Newcastle, provided that it be united to a Zoological one; whereupon ‘proposed that it should be called a Zoological and Botanical Garden, and agreed to; I wondered why it should not be called the Botanical and Zoological Gardens.’

The minor agrémens of the meeting included the usual dinners and fetes; the botanical excursion headed by Dr. Graham; the descent of a coal-mine, with its breed of horses remarkable for their short and glossy hair like that of a mouse; and visits to a rope-walk, alkali works, and Richardson’s Crown Glass factory, which calls forth a reference to one of his encyclopaedic sources of general knowledge

The most interesting process was the converting the globe of glass into a flat sheet by merely twisting quickly the iron rod to which it was attached; if you remember, the process is well described in one of the late numbers of the Penny Magazine.

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