EAELY DAYS 



a passage in Mungo Park's * Travels ' in search of the source 

 of the Niger, when he describes himself so faint with hunger 

 and fatigue, that he laid himself down to die ; but being 

 attracted by the briUiant green of a httle moss on the bank 

 hard by, said to himself: If God cares for the hfe of that 

 httle moss. He surely will not let me perish in the desert. 

 Park put a piece of it in his pocket-book, and, fortified by 

 the thought, went on his way. He soon arrived at a hut 

 occupied by poor black women, who fed him, and sang 

 him to sleep with impromptu words, pitying the poor white 

 man far away from his home and friends.^ A scrap of that 

 moss was given to my father by Mungo Park, or a friend 

 of his, and was shown to me. It excited in me a desire to 

 read African travels, and I indulged in the childish dream 

 of entering Africa by Morocco, crossing the greater Atlas 

 (that had never been ascended) and so penetrating to Tim- 

 buctoo. That childish dream I never lost ; I nursed it 

 till, half a century afterwards, when, as your President has 

 told you to-day, I did (with my friend Mr. Ball, who is 

 here by me, and another friend, G. Maw, F.L.S.), ascend 

 to the summit of the previously unconquered Atlas. 

 >• When still a child, I was very foiid of Voyages and 

 Travels ; and my great dehght was to sit on my grand- 

 father's knee and look at the pictures in Cook's ' Voyages.' 

 The one that took my fancy most was the plate of Christmas 

 Harbour, Kerguelen Land, with the arched rock standing 

 out to sea, and the sailors killing penguins ; and I thought 

 I should be the happiest boy ahve if ever I would see that 

 wonderful arched rock, and knock penguins on the head. 

 By a singular coincidence, Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen 

 Land, was one of the very first places of interest visited by 

 me, in the Antarctic Expedition under Sir James Boss. 



* The spirit of a youth that means to be of note, begins 

 betimes,' and heredity and early training are strong among 

 the directing factors for such a spirit. As has been said, 

 Hooker's father, WilHam Jackson Hooker, was one of the first 

 botanists of his age ; his grandfather, Joseph Hooker, spent 

 much of his leisure in the cultivation of rare plants ; his 



' The incident of the moss occurs in chapter xix of Park's Travels, after 

 he had been robbed by a party of Foulahs ; the negro women's compassion 

 is an earlier incident of chapter xv. 



