586 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



as secretary of the Geological Society, with Lyell, for whom he 

 conceived a profound admiration and lifelong regard. 



Hooker left England in 1839, being then 22 years old, to accom- 

 pany Captain (afterwards Sir) James Clark Ross, the experienced 

 Arctic navigator, on the expedition of the Erebus and Terror to 

 the Southern Hemisphere and Antarctic polar regions. The main 

 purpose of this expedition was to make observations on terrestrial 

 magnetism and to determine the position of the southern magnetic 

 pole. But Ross was an ardent naturalist and anxious to observe 

 and collect both plants and marine animals, and accordingly man- 

 aged to take young Hooker as surgeon (he was M. D. of Glasgow) 

 to the Erebus and botanist to the expedition. Ross not only gave 

 his young surgeon every facility to collect plants in the various 

 lands visited, but also employed him to work the towing net and 

 make drawings of marine invertebrates when at sea. Some 60 years 

 later a large portfolio of these beautiful and interesting drawings, 

 which had never been published, were placed in the hands of the 

 present writer by their venerable author, to ascertain whether, 

 after so long an interval, they might have scientific value. 



Young Hooker had Charles Darwin's example before him, and 

 the recently published " Journal of a Naturalist on H. M. S. Beagle " 

 in his cabin, when he sailed on the Erebus, but did not make Dar- 

 win's acquaintance until 1817, four years after his return from the 

 Antarctic. Hooker's association with Lyell was earlier, for the 

 Lyells of Kinnordy were intimate friends of his father; and it was 

 from Sir Charles Lyell's father that he received the newly issued 

 copy of Darwin's "Journal," just in time to take it with him to the 

 Antarctic. With Charles . Lyell's great book he had early famil- 

 iarity, and he had also read Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the 

 Natural History of Creation, which appeared in 1832. Though not 

 a very convincing work, it turned his thoughts, with very definite 

 results, to the question of the mutability of species — already raised 

 by the essential nature of Lyell's geological doctrine and widely 

 discussed at that time in consequence of the writings of Lamarck 

 and St. Hilaire. 



To this group of three (Lyell, Darwin, and Hooker), who were 

 richly stored with knowledge of living things by their explorations 

 in many parts of the globe, there was now added a fourth, T. H. 

 Huxley. He made Hooker's acquaintance first at the British asso- 

 ciation meeting at Ipswich in 1851, having recently returned from 

 the voyage of the surveying ship Rattlesnake, to which he had been 

 appointed surgeon with a view to the opportunities thus provided of 

 making studies in marine zoology. Old Sir John Richardson, the 

 Arctic explorer, a first-rate naturalist and head of Haslar Hospital, 

 whither in those days young naval surgeons were sent on probation, 



