ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



329 



and his studies directed by reading and re - reading 

 Humboldt's ' Personal Narrative.' The ' Kosmos ' of 

 Humboldt closed the older, the ' Origin of Species ' 

 of Darwin opened the new, epoch of natural science : 

 the former was retrospective, the latter prospective. 

 Both works owe their origin to a visit to the same 

 portion of the globe, to a study of the subtropical scenery 

 and life of South America Humboldt having visited 

 the inland, Darwin specially the maritime and island 

 scenery. 1 It is further of interest to note how the 



30. 



Humboldt's 

 ' Kosmos ' 

 and the 

 ' Origin of 

 Species.' 



euced me nearly so much as these 

 two. I copied out from Humboldt 

 long passages about Teneriffe," <fec. 

 Also vol. i. p. 337 : " I never 

 forget that my whole course of life 

 is due to having read and re-read 

 as a youth Humboldt's ' Personal 

 Narrative. ' " 



1 Besides Darwin and Lyell, to 

 whom, of British naturalists as rep- 

 resenting the genetic view in the 

 middle of the century, I have so far 

 confined my remarks, there were 

 at that time two other eminent tueu 

 working in the same direction. The 

 views of these two were likewise 

 much influenced by travel and by 

 the study of plant and animal life 

 in distant countries. I refer to Sir 

 J. D. Hooker and Mr A. Russel 

 Wallace. The important part which 

 these men played in the gradual 

 conception and birth of the ideas 

 which were for the first time com- 

 prehensively set forth in the ' Origin 

 of Species ' is lucidly and imparti- 

 ally told by Huxley in the well- 

 known chapter which he con- 

 tributed to the second volume of 

 the ' Life and Letters of Charles 

 Darwin, 'edited by his son, Professor 

 Francis Darwin, in 1887. Few 

 episodes in the history of thought 

 have been treated with greater 

 mastery. Few botanists have 



possessed a greater personal know- 

 ledge of different and greatly vary- 

 ing floras than Sir J. D. Hooker, 

 who succeeded to the position and 

 labours of his father, Sir W. J. 

 Hooker, at Kew. After having 

 accompanied Captain Ross on his 

 Antarctic expedition for the dis- 

 covery of the South magnetic pole, 

 he became best known by his 

 'Himalayan Journal' (1854). It 

 was in constant correspondence and 

 intercourse with Hooker that Dar- 

 win, from 1844 to 1859, wrote his 

 first great work. The important 

 original contributions of Mr Wal- 

 lace are well known, and the story 

 how his paper, " On the Tendency 

 of Varieties to depart indefinitely 

 from the Original Type," reached 

 Darwin when he had got half 

 through the larger work which he 

 was then writing, how this coinci- 

 dence hastened the publication of 

 the two papers by Wallace and 

 Darwin, which "contained exactly 

 the same theory, " in the ' Journal 

 of the Limucan Society ' (Zoology, 

 vol. iii. p. 45), has been told by 

 Lyell and Hooker (ibid., letter to 

 the secretary), and by Darwin him- 

 self (Autobiography, in 'Life,' &c. , 

 vol. i. p. 84). No mystery lies 

 upon the history of the first enun- 

 ciation of the doctrine of natural 



