EABLY BOTANICAL INSTINCT 5 
taken pending his obtaining possession of a new house which 
he had purchased in West Bath Street (No. 17), in which 
lodgings I found my Grandfather and Grandmother Hooker, 
who had accompanied or followed my father to Glasgow 
with a mass of furniture from the Halesworth and Norwich 
houses, on some bedding from which I slept, for the first 
night, on the floor. 
Of the following years I have little of note to record 
beyond having an excellent governess, a Miss Turnbull, of 
whom I was very fond, and a mild attack of scarlet fever 
when I was six. No doubt I had other illnesses of childhood, 
as I had the credit of being the leader in contracting them. 
At the age of five or six, my early leaning towards botany 
was shown by a love of mosses, and my mother used to tell an 
anecdote of me, that, when I was still in petticoats, I was 
found grubbing in a wall in the dirty suburbs of the dirty 
city of Glasgow, and that, when she asked me what I was 
about, I cried out that I had found Bryum argenteum (which 
it was not), a very pretty little moss I had seen in my 
father's collection, and to which I had taken a great fancy .^ 
At a later period, when still in my early teens, I took up 
the study of these beautiful objects, and formed a good 
collection of the Scottish species in the Highlands and 
elsewhere ; and my first effort as an author was the descrip- 
tion of three new mosses from the Himalaya. ^ 
Of this early love of botany and kindred eagerness for travel, 
he continues in the Eoyal Society speech already quoted : 
A little older, and when still a child, my father used to 
take me excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good 
deal, but also botanised ; and well I remember on one 
occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of 
stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, 
and stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected 
on it, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered 
them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany. 
Another little circumstance connected with a moss had 
also its influence on my future career. You may remember 
1 This is the better version of the tale, as given in the Royal Society speech 
above mentioned. 
« See p. 22. 
VOL. I. B 
