IMAGINAEY DISSIPATIONS 63 
Landscape drawing was by no means one of the lighter 
occupations banned by Sir WiUiam. Like his father-in-law, 
Dawson Turner, the friend and connexion of Cotman, he cared 
for art beyond his own botanical draughtsmanship. ' I rejoice 
that you make drawings of scenery. They will be invaluable.' 
And in the same strain his shipmate Dayman writes on 
August 27, 1841, from Tasmania to Hooker in New Zealand : 
I am particularly happy that you have found the drawings 
you made on the passage out to be of more value than you 
expected — if it be only as an encouragement to make more, 
for upon my word without flattery (which you know by 
this time I am incapable of) if you do not something of the 
kind, I do not know who will. As far as poor McC[ormick] 
is concerned, one of the m.ain objects of the Expedition has 
already failed. 
Valuable as his zoological researches were, both in satis- 
fying his restless intellectual interests and in giving him fuller 
understanding of hving Nature, his father — strict botanist of 
the older school— mistrusted any swerving from the closest 
allegiance to botany. He took alarm at the remark (Febru- 
ary 3, 1840), ' My time has been so completely occupied 
with sea animals that I have httle time for other drawing.' 
When he showed his son's first collections to Kobert Brown 
he diplomatically abstained from mentioning these zoological 
dissipations, for ' Brown's idea is that without neglecting 
such things, your time even at sea ought to be mainlij devoted 
to studying the plants you have collected,' a thing that proved 
easier to do in the calm of the pack-ice than on the unquiet 
expanse of the Southern Ocean. 
Nor was this his only stricture. To try too much is to 
become ineffectual. He urges his son to stick to botanical 
work exclusively — to avoid wasting his time in unnecessary 
entertainments ; counsel indeed scarcely needed for one who 
cared so little for the ordinary attractions of society. But 
Sir Wilham's definition of frivolity is strangely wide. 
The first halting- place of the expedition was the beautiful 
island of Madeira, lovely with semi-tropical vegetation, and 
