262 TO DAKJILING : FIRST HIMALAYAN JOUENEY 



the countries and rivers are utterly unknown to Europeans, 

 it little signifies whether the latter debouche in the Arctic 

 Ocean or the Bay of Bengal. Hodgson is a particularly 

 gentlemanly and agreeable person, but he looks sickly ; he 

 is handsome, with a grand forehead and delicate, finely-cut 

 features ; when arrayed in his furs and wearing the Scotch 

 bonnet and eagle feather with which it is his pleasure to 

 adorn himself, he would make a striking picture. He is 

 a clever person and can be wickedly sarcastic ; he called 

 Lord Ellenborough (the haughtiest nobleman in all India) 

 a ' knave and coxcomb ' to his face (true enough, though 

 not exactly a fact to be told with impunity), and then squibbed 

 his lordship ; you must know that Lord E. had previously 

 applied to Hodgson the sobriquet of an Ornithological Hum- 

 bug, and had turned him out of his Eesidentship at Nepaul, 

 because he had (by Lord Auckland's desire) clapped the 

 Eajah into confinement. In short, Lord Ellenborough and 

 Mr. Hodgson kept up a running fire, till his Lordship left 

 the country. Happily, Hodgson lost no friends ; but he 

 lost by it his salary of 7000 a year, his Palace to live in, 

 and the Insignia of the British Eesident in the proudest 

 court in India, and then withdrew to these Hills, on 1000, 

 as a Eetired Civil Servant. 



It will be remembered how, in the early days of the Antarctic 

 Expedition, botanists of the strictest school, like Sir William 

 Hooker and Dawson Turner and Eobert Brown, looked askance 

 at divagations into other branches of science. Joseph Hooker 

 not only possessed an energetic curiosity which overflowed by 

 its very abundance into every branch of Natural History, but 

 was convinced that the botanist as well as the traveller was in- 

 complete without being also something of a geologist, a geog- 

 rapher, a meteorologist, and a map-maker. With a journey 

 in utterly uncharted regions before him, he took pains to become 

 a competent surveyor. Yet even then, after warmly thanking 

 his father for ever generous help, he half apologises for spending 

 part of his time on anything but pure botany. 



October 1, 1848. 



My solace is that you will not find that Botany has suffered 

 by my fondness for other pursuits, without which no traveller 



