characteristically reminds him of what he considered a slight to his father, viz., that he had not received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. This, the highest honour which men of science can aspire to, is open not merely to Britons but to all the world, and I should doubt whether Sir William had ever been high in the list of possible recipients.
We are now approaching the great change wrought in the scientific outlook of the world by the Origin of Species. In November 1856, after reading Darwin’s MS. on geographical distribution, Hooker wrote that though “never very stubborn about unalterability of specific type, I never felt so shaky about species before.” It must be remembered that throughout the companionship of Hooker and Darwin the latter was a convinced evolutionist. He writes in his autobiography that in 1838, after reading Malthus on Population, he was convinced of the origin of new species by means of natural selection. Throughout the close intercourse which subsisted for so many years between Hooker and Darwin, in which the views afterwards put forth in the Origin of Species were discussed, Hooker seems not to have been a convinced evolutionist. His conversion dates apparently from 1858, when the papers by Darwin and Wallace were read at the Linnean Society. This has always appeared to me remarkable, and T. H. Huxley [124] has said with regard to his own position:—“My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the
‘Origin’ was, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’”
After the publication of the Origin of Species Hooker wrote to Darwin, [125] “I have not yet got half through the book, not from want of will, but of time—for it is the very hardest book to read, to full profit, that I ever tried—it is so cram-full of matter and reasoning. . . . Somehow it reads very different from the MS., and I often fancy that I must have been very stupid not to have more fully followed it in MS.”
Whatever Hooker may have been he was not stupid, and though nowadays it is easy to feel surprise that his long-continued familiarity with Darwin’s work had not earlier convinced him of the doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection, we must ascribe it rather to his early education in the sacrosanct meaning of the word species.
I think it must have been roughly about the time of the publication of the Origin of Species that my earliest memories of Sir Joseph Hooker refer. I clearly remember his eating gooseberries with us as children, in the kitchen garden at Down. The love of gooseberries was a bond between us which had no existence in the case of our uncles, who either ate no gooseberries or preferred to do so in solitude. By a process of evolutionary change the word gooseberry took on a new meaning at Down. Hooker used to send Darwin some especially fine bananas grown in the Kew hothouses, and these were called Kew gooseberries. It was characteristic
of my father to feel doubts as to whether he ought to receive Royal bananas from a Royal garden. I wish I could remember Hooker romping with us as children, of which he somewhere speaks.
It was about this time that Darwin had a fancy to make out the names of the English grasses, and Hooker wrote, “How on earth you have made out 30 grasses rightly is a mystery to me. You must have a marvellous tact for appreciating diagnosis.” It was at this time that one of Darwin’s boys remarked in regard to a grass he had found:—“I are an extraordinary grass-finder, and must have it particularly by me all dinner.” Strange to say he did not grow into a botanist.
Hooker’s letters at this time impress me with the difficulty he met with in adapting his systematic work to the doctrines of evolution. He gives the impression of working at species in a puzzled or discontented frame of mind. Thus on 1st January 1859, he writes to a fellow-botanist:—“What I shall try to do is, to harmonise the facts with the newest doctrines, not because they are the truest, but because they do give you room to reason and reflect at present, and hopes for the future, whereas the old stick-in-the-mud doctrines of absolute creations, multiple creations, and dispersion by actual causes under existing circumstances, are all used up, they are so many stops to further enquiry.”
A few days later he continues to the same correspondent: “If the course of migration does not agree with that of birds, winds, currents, etc., so much the worse for the facts of migration!” On