838 EEPORT— 1895. 



Hooker delivered his classical lecture on Insular Floras. It implicitly accepted 

 the new doctrine, and applied it with admirable effect to a field which had long 

 waited for an illuminating principle. The lecture itself has since remained one of 

 the corner-stones of that rational theory of the geographical distribution of plants 

 which may, I think, be claimed fairly as of purely English origin. 



Henslow. 



Addressing you as I do at Ipswich, there is one name written in the annals of 

 our old Section which I cannot pass over — that of Ilenslow. He was the Secretary 

 of the Biological Section at its tirst meeting in 1832, and its President at Bristol in 

 1836. I suppose there are few men of this century who have indirectly more 

 influenced the current of human thought. For in great measure I think it will not 

 be contested that we owe Darwin to him. As Romanes has told us : ' ' His letters 

 written to Professor Ilenslow during his voyage round the world overflow with 

 feelings of affection, veneration, and obligation to his accomplished master and 

 dearest friend — feelings which throughout his life he retained with no diminished 

 intensity. As he used himself to say, before he knew Professor Henslow the only 

 objects he cared for were foxes and partridges.' I do not wish to overstate the 

 facts. The possession of 'the collector's instinct, strong in Darwin from his 

 childhood, as is usually the case in great naturalists,' to use Huxley's'- words, 

 would have borne its usual fruit in after life, in some shape or other, even if 

 Darwin had not fallen into Henslow's hands. But then the particular train of 

 events wliich culminated in the great work of his life would never have been 

 started. It appeared to me, then, that it would not be an altogether uninteresting 

 investigation to ascertain something about Henslow himself. The result has been 

 to provide me with several texts, which I think it may be not unprofitable to 

 dwell upon on the present occasion. 



In the first place, what was the secret of his influence over Darwin ? 'My 

 dear old master in Natural History ' (' Life,' ii. 317) he calls him ; and to have stood 

 in this relation to Darwin ^ is no small matter. Again, he speaks of his friendship 

 with him as ' a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any 

 other ' (i. 52). The singular beauty of Henslow's character, to which Darwin 

 himself bore noble testimony, would count for something, but it would not in 

 itself be a sufficient explanation. Nor was it that intellectual fascination which 

 often binds pupils to the master's feet ; for, as Darwin tells us, ' I do not suppose 

 that anyone would say that he possessed much original genius ' (i. 52). The real 

 attraction seems to me to be found in Henslow's possession, in an extraordinary 

 degree, of what may be called the Natural History spirit. This resolves itself 

 into keen observation and a lively interest in the facts observed. ' His strongest 

 taste was to draw conclusions from long-continued minute observations ' (i. 52). 

 The old Natural History method, of which it seems to me that Henslow was 

 so striking an embodiment, is now, and I think unhappily, almost a thing of the 

 past. The modern university student of botany puts his elders to blush by his 

 minute knowdedge of some small point in vegetable histology. But he can tell 

 you little of the contents of a country hedgerow ; and if you put an unfamiliar 

 plant in his hands he is pretty much at a loss how to set about recognising its 

 affinities. Disdaining the field of nature spread at his feet in his own country, he 

 either seeks salvation in a German laboratory or hurries oft" to the Tropics, con- 

 vinced that he will at once immortalise himself. But ' cwlinn non anhnwm mvtat ' ; 

 he puts into ' pickle ' the same objects as his predecessors, never to be looked at 

 again ; or perhaps writes a paper on some obvious phenomena which he could 

 have studied with less fatigue in the Palm House at Kew. 



The secret of the right use of travel is the possession of the Natural History 

 instinct, and to those who contemplate it I can only recommend a careful study of 

 Darwin's ' Naturalist's Voyage.' Nothing that came in his way seems to have 



' Memorial Notices, 13. " Proc. R.S., xliv. vi. 



' As I shall have frequent occasion to quote the Life and Letters, I shall insert 

 the references in the text. 



