A GREAT NATURALIST— SIR JOSEPH 

 HOOKER. 1 



By Sir E. Ray Lankestek, K. C. B., F. R. S. 



It often happens in the progress of human thought that periods 

 of special importance are marked, not, as rarely occurs, by the 

 emergence of a solitary genius, but by the appearance of a group of 

 gifted men of like habit of mind and enthusiasm for a given branch 

 of study. Their coincidence in mental activity has been due some- 

 times to family connection and local association, sometimes to the 

 system of universities in which a professor of genius is succeeded 

 by his pupil and he again by his, so that a "school" originates 

 which may spread its members and its teaching far and wide. 



In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of naturalists 

 appeared in this country who were destined to bring about a momen- 

 tous change in human thought, by placing on a firm basis the doctrine 

 of " organic evolution " — a doctrine which includes the gradual and 

 "natural" development of living things from nonliving matter, 

 and further the gradual and " natural " development of man from 

 an animal ancestry. The group we have in view has Charles Lyell 

 (born in 1797) as its starting point. Devoted from his earliest 

 years to the study of natural history (his father being an accom- 

 plished botanist) , Charles Lyell, when an undergraduate at Exeter 

 College, Oxford, was attracted to geological study by the lectures 

 of Canon Buckland. He was called to the bar, but fortunately his 

 inherited property enabled him to abandon that profession when he 

 was 30 years old, and to give all his energy to his favorite science. 



In 1830-1832 Lyell published his memorable work entitled " The 

 Principles of Geology : An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes 

 of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation." 

 That book and personal friendship with its author had a command- 

 ing influence upon two younger men, Charles Robert Darwin and 

 Joseph Dalton Hooker, the former 12 years and the latter 20 years 

 Lyell's junior. Darwin, who had studied geology with Sedgwick 

 of Cambridge, was away on the voyage of the Beagle from 1831 to 

 1836, when Lyell's great book was published, but came immediately 

 under its influence on his return, and in 1838 was closely associated. 



1 Reprinted by permission from the Quarterly Review, October, 1918. 



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