EARLY DAYS 303 



under examination, often as living specimens. Between the 

 garden and the house the boy must have witnessed constantly, 

 during the most receptive years of childhood, the working of an 

 establishment that was at the time without its equal in this 

 country, or probably in any other. The eye and the memory 

 must have been trained almost unconsciously. A knowledge of 

 plants would be acquired as a natural consequence of the sur- 

 roundings, and without the effort entailed by study in later 

 years. Few ever have known, or ever will know, plants as he 

 did. Such knowledge comes only from growing up with them 

 from earliest childhood. 



Side by side with this almost unconscious education in 

 Botany the ordinary curriculum of school and of college was 

 pursued. There is no record of academic successes either at the 

 High School, or at the University of Glasgow, beyond a prize 

 "for the best Essay on the Brain and Nerves," in 1836. But the 

 following year saw his first publication : for he described, while 

 still a student, three new species of Mosses. It may be remarked 

 that, like his father, his first writings related to the lower Plants. 

 He never lost his interest in them, though in later years duty 

 diverted him to the study of the Flowering Plants. An incident 

 of his student period, which he himself relates, is, however, a 

 more clear indication of the life that was to follow than any 

 early publication of new species. He tells how an opportunity 

 was given him of reading the proofs of Darwin's Voyage of the 

 Beagle. " I was hurrying on my studies (that is for the final 

 examination in Medicine)... and so pressed for time was I that I 

 used to sleep with the sheets of ' The Journal ' under my pillow, 

 that I might read them between waking and rising. They 

 impressed me profoundly, whilst they stimulated me to en- 

 thusiasm in the desire to travel and observe." The opportunity 

 came to him almost at once in the four years' voyage to the 

 Antarctic. At the age of 22, having passed his examinations, 

 and graduated as M.D., he was equipped at every necessary 

 point for his duties as Assistant Surgeon and Botanist in the 

 " Erebus," then about to start, along with the " Terror," on the 

 famous voyage under the command of Sir James Clark Ross. 



No attempt will here be made to give any consecutive 



