MUTUAL HELP 491 



It was a unique relationship of minds. Each had had 

 the same kind of experience in world-travel, and had observed 

 nature, animate and inanimate, with a special interest in the 

 same question namely, how the different forms of life had 

 reached their present habitats. In this, indeed, the younger 

 man had taken the elder for his model. Before their friend- 

 ship and alliance began, Darwin, the born scientific enquirer 

 with philosophic breadth of mind albeit small technical training, 

 had advanced far along his memorable line of research. He 

 took everything for his province that bore on heredity and 

 variation, fertility and decline in living forms, the competition 

 they had to meet, their range and movement, the relation 

 of them to their fossil predecessors in the same area, the 

 geological changes which had determined the ancient courses 

 of migration. Hooker, master of a whole branch of science, 

 with technical training in it from his childhood up, and equally 

 awake to the part played by geologic change in the problems 

 of distribution he longed to solve, eagerly placed his vast 

 knowledge, his sound criticism, his special observation during 

 his later travels, at the disposal of the inspiring friend and 

 fellow-worker who had gone so much further on the same 

 quest as himself and had pushed it into wider fields than his 

 own. 



Each was deeply conscious of his debt to the other. Of 

 the discussions they used to have, Hooker records (' Life and 

 Letters of Charles Darwin,' ii. 27) : 'I at any rate always left 

 with the feeling that I had imparted nothing and carried away 

 more than I could stagger under.' Darwin from the earliest 

 time feels the immense value of his help, in books lent, 

 summaries of results, in published works, letters, conversations. 

 1 For my own part/ he writes after a visit of Hooker's to Down, 

 * I learn more in these discussions than in ten times over 

 the number of hours reading.' And again, after reading the 

 Antarctic Flora, he speaks of having ' extracted more facts 

 and views from you than from any other person,' while * my 

 pen runs away with me when writing to you ' (March 19, 1845). 



The thanks of a later period are foreshadowed by the 

 thanks of the first twelvemonth, as : 



