30 EARLY DAYS 



Even in later life the delivery of an address meant a strain 

 which brought on physical nausea and severe nervous reaction. 



As he grew up, he went far afield on his botanical expedi- 

 tions. On September 2, 1836, Sir William, sending a belated 

 acceptance of an invitation for Joseph to visit his grandfather, 

 writes : * I only returned from a Highland tour with Dr. Graham, 

 Mr. Wilson ^ and Joseph last Saturday. The latter had been 

 away some weeks with Mr. Wilson amongst the Aberdeenshire 

 mountains, and I could not communicate with him but by 

 ferreting him out in person, which I did, and found him and 

 Wilson at the old hovel at the foot of Ben Lomond, where they 

 were nearly a week.' 



On his way to Yarmouth, he stays at Liverpool with Mr. 

 Melly, a collector of beetles, among whose specimens he sees the 

 Goliathi, which he afterwards collected himself in Lidia ; and 

 at Manchester with Mr. Glover,^ possessor of a less valuable 

 collection ; at each city visiting the Museum and Botanical 

 Gardens. The Manchester Gardens are ' the finest I ever saw ; 

 finer, I think, than Edinburgh, though not, certainly, so good 

 a collection of plants.' 



Then at Hull he stays with William Spence, joint author 

 with William Kirby (a Norwich man) of the famous * Introduc- 

 tion to Entomology,' examining his rich collection and twice 

 going out entomologising with him. 



At Yarmouth he works keenly in his grandfather's and 

 Miss Hutchins' herbaria ; and as a result asks his father to 

 re-examine his own specimen^ of a certain moss {Bryum 

 triquetrum) in order to correct what he feels sure is a wrong 

 ascription of a specimen of his grandfather's. So, too, the latter 

 has just received five specimens of the narrow-leaved lungwort 



^ William Wilson (1799-1871) was a botanist who had been attracted to 

 the study during the open-air life necessitated by an early breakdown from 

 overwork. In 1827 he was introduced by Henslow to Sir W. Hooker, and 

 joined him in his annual students' botanical excursion. Through Hooker he 

 devoted himself to the mosses, and described the mosses collected on Ross's 

 Voyage. His great work, the Bryologia Britannica (1855), though intended 

 to be a third edition of W. J. Hooker's Miiscologia, was substantially a new 

 work of the highest merit. Among the new species added to the British 

 Flora by Wilson, his name is preserved in the rose named after him by Borrer, 

 and the Killamey filmy fern {Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) by Sir W. Hooker. 



* Perhaps Stephen Glover {d. 1869), known for his Peak Guide, 1830, and 

 History of the County of Derby, 1831-3. 



