262 TO DAEJILING : FIRST HIMALAYAN JOURNEY 
the countries and rivers are utterly unknown to Europeans, 
it little signifies whether the latter dehouche in the Arctic 
Ocean or the Bay of Bengal. Hodgson is a particularly 
gentlemanly and agreeable person, but he looks sickly ; he 
is handsome, with a grand forehead and delicate, finely-cut 
features ; when arrayed in his furs and wearing the Scotch 
bonnet and eagle feather with which it is his pleasure to 
adorn himself, he would make a striking picture. He is 
a clever person and can be wickedly sarcastic ; he called 
Lord Ellenborough (the haughtiest nobleman in all India) 
a ' knave and coxcomb ' to his face (true enough, though 
not exactly a fact to be told with impunity), and then squibbed 
his lordship ; you must know^ that Lord E. had previously 
applied to Hodgson the sobriquet of an Ornithological Hum- 
hug, and had turned him out of his Residentship at Nepaul, 
because he had (by Lord Auckland's desire) clapped the 
Rajah into confinement. In short, Lord Ellenborough and 
Mr. Hodgson kept up a running fire, till his Lordship left 
the country. Happily, Hodgson lost no friends ; but he 
lost by it his salary of £7000 a year, his Palace to live in, 
and the Insignia of the British Resident in the proudest 
court in India, and then withdrew to these Hills, on £1000, 
as a Retired Civil Servant. 
It will be remembered how, in the early days of the Antarctic 
Expedition, botanists of the strictest school, like Sir William 
Hooker and Dawson Turner and Robert Brown, looked askance 
at divagations into other branches of science. Joseph Hooker 
not only possessed an energetic curiosity which overflowed by 
its very abundance into every branch of Natural History, but 
was convinced that the botanist as well as the traveller was in- 
complete without being also something of a geologist, a geog- 
rapher, a meteorologist, and a map-maker. With a journey 
in utterly uncharted regions before him, he took pains to become 
a competent surveyor. Yet even then, after warmly thinking 
his father for ever generous help, he half apologises for spending 
part of his time on anything but pure botany. 
October 1, 1848. 
My solace is that you will not find that Botany has suffered 
by my fondness for other pursuits, without which no traveller 
