EARLY LEANINGS 207 







I shall be content.... The utmost extent of my ambition would 

 be to get a professorship of natural history." 



His parents had thought of placing the boy with an eminent 

 chemist in London, but his obvious antipathy to the prospect of 

 city life led to his entering his father's office in Limerick instead. 

 The quiet home life which ensued was well suited to his taste. 

 All holidays were devoted to collecting. The family had a 

 summer residence at Miltown Malbay, on the Atlantic coast, 

 an excellent spot for Algae ; and it was no doubt the time 

 spent there that brought these plants prominently under his 

 notice, and led to the noteworthy researches of later days. For 

 the time, Mollusca still mainly occupied his mind, and in 1829, 

 at eighteen years of age, we find him busily engaged in drawing 

 the plates for a Testacea Hibernica a book that never saw the 

 light, though two years later he writes of being at work on his 

 Bivalvia Hibernica, which was then half finished. 



In the same year, he made his first excursion into " foreign 

 parts " as he calls them, visiting Dublin, Liverpool, London, 

 Edinburgh and Glasgow. An account of a meeting of the 

 Linnean Society, to which he was taken by his friend Bicheno, 

 then secretary, and at which " if not edified I was amused," 

 shows that the reverence he felt for science did not necessarily 

 extend to constituted scientific authority. " The President wore 

 a three-cocked hat of ample dimensions, and sat in a crimson 

 arm-chair in great state. I saw a number of new Fellows 

 admitted. They were marched one by one to the president, 

 who rose, and taking them by the hand, admitted them. The 

 process costs 25" 



In 1831, his finding at Killarney of the beautiful moss 

 Hookeria laetevirens, hitherto unknown in Ireland, led to the 

 formation of one of the warmest and most valuable friendships 

 of his life. He forwarded specimens, with a characteristic letter, 

 to W. J. Hooker at Glasgow, and the kind and encouraging 

 reply which he received led to further letters and eventually to 

 an intimacy which seems to have been prized equally on both 

 sides. Hooker recognized at once the extraordinary talent of 

 the shy young man of twenty, lent him books, asked him 

 to visit him, and congratulated him on his critical faculty, 



