1 88 1.] SIR JOSEPH HOOKER'S ADDRESS. 247 



Your idea, to show what travellers have done, seems to me 

 a brilliant and just one, especially considering your audience. 



1. I know nothing about Tournefort's works. 



2. I believe that you are fully right in calling Humboldt 

 the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived. I have lately 

 read two or three volumes again. His Geology is funny stuff; 

 but that merely means that he was not in advance of his age. 

 I should say he was wonderful, more for his near approach to 

 omniscience than for originality. Whether or not his position 

 as a scientific man is as eminent as we think, you might truly 

 call him the parent of a grand progeny of scientific travellers, 

 who, taken together, have done much for science. 



3. It seems to me quite just to give Lyell (and secondarily 

 E. Forbes) a very prominent place. 



4. Dana was, I believe, the first man who maintained the 

 permanence of continents and the great oceans. . . . When I 

 read the ' Challenger 's ' conclusion that sediment from the 

 land is not deposited at greater distances than 200 to 300 

 miles from the land, I was much strengthened in my old 

 belief. Wallace seems to me to have argued the case ex- 

 cellently. Nevertheless, I would speak, if I were in your place, 

 rather cautiously ; for T. Mellard Reade has argued lately 

 with some force against the view ; but I cannot call to mind his 

 arguments. If forced to express a judgment, I should abide 

 by the view of approximate permanence since Cambrian days. 



5. The extreme importance of the Arctic fossil plants, is 

 self-evident. Take the opportunity of groaning over [our] 

 ignorance of the Lignite Plants of Kerguelen Land, or any 

 Antarctic land. It might do good. 



6. I cannot avoid feeling sceptical about the travelling of 

 plants from the North except during the Tertiary period. It 

 may of course have been so and probably was so from one 

 of the two poles at the earliest period, during Pre-Cambrian 

 ages ; but such speculations seem to me hardly scientific, 

 seeing how little we know of the old Floras. 



