was Maria, daughter of
Dawson Turner, banker, botanist and archaeologist, so that science was
provided on both sides of the pedigree.

It would seem that Sir Joseph's mother was somewhat of a martinet. When
Joseph came in from school he had to present himself to her, and "was not
allowed to sit down in her presence without permission."

In 1832, Joseph, then fifteen years of age, entered Glasgow University,
being already, in the words of his father, "a fair British botanist" with
"a tolerable herbarium very much of his own collecting"; he adds, "Had he
time for it, he would already be more useful to me than Mr Klotzsch" [his
assistant].

It was in 1838 that Hooker got his opportunity, for it chanced that James
Clerk Ross, the Arctic explorer, was in 1838 visiting at the Smiths of
Jordan Hill. In order that Joseph might meet Ross, both he and his
father were invited to breakfast. The meeting ended in Ross promising to
take him as surgeon and naturalist. There seems to have been a little
innocent jobbery with folks in high places, and it fortunately turned out
that the expedition was delayed so that Joseph had the opportunity of
spending some time at Haslar Hospital.

The expedition seems to have been fitted out with astonishing poverty.
Seventy years later he wrote, "Except some drying paper for plants, I had
not a single instrument or book supplied to me as a naturalist--all were
given to me by my father. I had, however, the use of Ross's library, and
you may hardly credit it, but it is fact that not a single glass bottle
was supplied for collecting purposes; empty pickle bottles were all we
had, and rum as a preservative from the ship's stores."

It is interesting to find Ross, in his preliminary talk with Hooker,
saying that he wanted a trained naturalist, "such a person as Mr
Darwin"--to which Hooker aptly retorted by asking what Mr Darwin was
before he went out.

I imagine that Hooker was lucky in being taken on Ross's voyage _as a
naturalist_, since the primary object of the expedition was to fill up
"the wide blanks in the knowledge of terrestrial magnetism in the
southern hemisphere."

It seems like a forecast of what was to be the chief friendship of his
life, that Darwin's _Naturalist's Voyage_ should have been one of the
books that inspired him to join in the voyage of the _Erebus_ and
_Terror_. Hooker "slept with the proofs under his pillow, and devoured
them eagerly the moment he woke in the mo