The Botanical Work of Darwin . xi 
It must, however, be remembered that his Cirripede work 
had done much more than make him a zoologist ; it made 
him, in a general sense, a systematist, and this must have 
been of incalculable value. 
In the matter of geographical distribution he had at least 
enjoyed the great advantage of seeing the vegetation of the 
world, but he had seen it with ignorant eyes. In 1836, 
immediately after his return from his voyage, he wrote : — 
‘ I felt very foolish when Mr. Don remarked on the beautiful 
appearance of some plant with an astounding long name, and 
asked me about its habitation. Some one else seemed quite 
surprised that I knew nothing about a Carex from I do not 
know where. I was at last forced to plead most entire 
innocence, and that I knew no more about the plants which 
I had collected than the man in the moon V 
To the end of his life he never made any pretence to be 
a botanist, or at best ‘ one of those botanists who do not 
know one plant from another,’ a saying, attributed to Nageli, 
which he was fond of quoting. Thus, too, he wrote to Asa 
Gray on being elected to the Botanical Section of the French 
Institute : — e It is rather a good joke that I should be elected 
in the Botanical Section, as the extent of my knowledge is 
little more than that a daisy is a compositous plant, and a pea 
a leguminous one 2 .’ He was in fact guilty of evolution, but 
with extenuating botanical circumstances. 
It is perhaps not out of place to call attention, as I have 
done, to the poverty of professional training with which he 
attacked evolution on its botanical side ; it not merely brings 
out his power of using the work of others, but it also brings 
out the value of his point of view, that he should, equipped 
as he was, have revolutionized botanical geography. Again, 
it makes clear to us the supreme value to him and to science 
of his lifelong friendship with Sir J. D. Hooker. All readers 
of the Life and Letters must have been struck with the 
paramount importance of the Hooker correspondence as 
1 Life and Letters, Vol. i, p. 275. 
' l Ibid., Vol. iii, p. 224. 
