6 EAKLY DAYS 
a passage in Mungo Park's ' Travels ' in search of the source 
of the Niger, when he describes himself so faint with hunger 
and fatigue, that he laid himself down to die ; but being 
attracted by the brilliant green of a httle moss on the bank 
hard by, said to himself : If God cares for the life of that 
little moss. He surely will not let me perish in the desert. 
Park put a piece of it in his pocket-book, and, fortified by 
the thought, went on his way. He soon arrived at a hut 
occupied by poor black women, who fed him, and sang 
him to sleep with impromptu words, pitying the poor white 
man far away from his home and friends.^ A scrap of that 
moss was given to my father by Mungo Park, or a friend 
of his, and was shown to me. It excited in me a desire to 
read African travels, and I indulged in the childish dream 
of entering Africa by Morocco, crossing the greater Atlas 
(that had never been ascended) and so penetrating to Tim- 
buctoo. That childish dream I never lost ; I nursed it 
till, half a centmy afterwards, when, as your President has 
told you to-day, I did (with my friend ^Mr. Ball, who is 
here by me, and another friend, G. Maw, F.L.S.), ascend 
to the summit of the previously unconquered Atlas. 
^ When still a child, I was very fond of Voyages and 
Travels ; and my great dehght was to sit on my gi'and- 
father's knee and look at the pictures in Cook's ' Voyages.' 
The one that took my fancy most was the plate of Christmas 
Harbour, Kerguelen Land, with the arched rock standing 
out to sea, and the sailors kilhng penguins ; and I thought 
I should be the happiest boy alive if ever I would see that 
wonderful arched rock, and knock penguins on the head. 
By a singular coincidence, Christmas Harbom', Kerguelen 
Land, was one of the very first places of interest visited by 
me, in the Antarctic Expedition under Sir James Boss. 
' The spirit of a 5^outh that means to be of note, begins 
betimes,' and heredity and early training are strong among 
the directing factors for such a spirit. As has been said, 
Hooker's father, Wilham Jackson Hooker, was one of the first 
botanists of his age ; his grandfather, Joseph Hooker, spent 
much of his leisure in the cultivation of rare plants ; his 
' The incident of the moss occurs in chapter xix of Park's Travels, after 
he had been robbed by a party of Foulahs ; the negro women's compassion 
is an earlier incident of chapter xv. 
