FIEST MEETING WITH DARWIN 487 
merits on the living action of plants, sure of sympathy, yet 
begging Hooker, if he could spare time to read these letters, 
at least to waste none of his too busy hours in answering 
them, saying : 
It is a pleasure to me to write to you, as I have no one 
to talk to about such matter as we write on. But I seriously 
beg you not to write to me, unless so inclined ; for busy as 
you are and seeing many people, the case is very different 
between us (June 19, 1860). It is the greatest temptation 
to me to write ad infinitum to you (July 19, 1856). 
As to direct botanical aid, he wrote with enthusiastic appre- 
ciation and careful criticism of Hooker's pubHcations, which 
bore so closely on his own work. But this was the smallest 
part of their scientific interchange. Though he repeatedly 
insists 'Do not answer questions merely out of good nature ' ['of 
which towards me you have a most abundant stock ' (April 8, 
1857), ' as wonderful as mesmerism' (1846)], it was the unstinted 
privilege of the elder friend to ask, as it was the privilege of the 
younger to answer from the fulness of his botanical knowledge, 
a host of questions bearing on the relations and distribution of 
individual plants and groups of plants, wherein lie answers to 
some of the riddles of life. 
The beginnings of this friendship have been told by Hooker 
himself in the ' Life of Darwin,' ii. 19. 
My first meeting with Mr. Darwin [he tells us] was in 
1839, in Trafalgar Square. I was walking with an officer 
who had been his shipmate for a short time in the Beagle 
seven years before, but who had not, I beheve, since met 
him. I was introduced ; the interview was of course brief, 
and the memory that I carried away and still retain was 
that of a rather tall and rather broad-shouldered man, with 
a slight stoop, an agreeable and animated expression when 
talking, beetle brows, and a hollow but mellow voice ; and 
that his greeting of his old acquaintance was sailor-Hke — 
that is, delightfully frank and cordial. 
It has already been told how the proofs of the 'Voyage of the 
Beagle ' reached him through the Lyells in the spring of that 
