EABLY BOTANICAL INSTINCT 5 



taken pending his obtaining possession of a new house which 

 he had purchased in West Bath Street (No. 17), in which 

 lodgings I found my Grandfather and Grandmother Hooker, 

 who had accompanied or followed my father to Glasgow 

 with a mass of furniture from the Halesworth and Norwich 

 houses, on some bedding from which I slept, for the first 

 night, on the floor. 



Of the following years I have little of note to record 

 beyond having an excellent governess, a Miss Turnbull, of 

 whom I was very fond, and a mild attack of scarlet fever 

 when I was six. No doubt I had other illnesses of childhood, 

 as I had the credit of being the leader in contracting them. 



At the age of five or six, my early leaning towards botany 

 was shown by a love of mosses, and my mother used to tell an 

 anecdote of me, that, when I was still in petticoats, I was 

 found grubbing in a wall in the dirty suburbs of the dirty 

 city of Glasgow, and that, when she asked me what I was 

 about, I cried out that I had found Bryum argenteum (which 

 it was not), a very pretty little moss I had seen in my 

 father's collection, and to which I had taken a great fancy. 1 



At a later period, when still in my early teens, I took up 

 the study of these beautiful objects, and formed a good 

 collection of the Scottish species in the Highlands and 

 elsewhere ; and my first effort as an author was the descrip- 

 tion of three new mosses from the Himalaya. 2 



Of this early love of botany and kindred eagerness for travel, 

 he continues in the Koyal Society speech already quoted : 



A little older, and when still a child, my father used to 

 take me excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good 

 deal, but also botanised ; and well I remember on one 

 occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of 

 stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, 

 and stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected 

 on it, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered 

 them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany. 



Another little circumstance connected with a moss had 

 also its influence on my future career. You may remember 



1 This is the better version of the tale, as given in the Royal Society speech 

 above mentioned. 

 8 See p. 22. 



VOL. I. B 



