r reading
Darwin's MS. on geographical distribution, Hooker wrote that though
"never very stubborn about unalterability of specific type, I never felt
so shaky about species before." It must be remembered that throughout
the companionship of Hooker and Darwin the latter was a convinced
evolutionist. He writes in his autobiography that in 1838, after reading
Malthus on Population, he was convinced of the origin of new species by
means of natural selection. Throughout the close intercourse which
subsisted for so many years between Hooker and Darwin, in which the views
afterwards put forth in the _Origin of Species_ were discussed, Hooker
seems not to have been a convinced evolutionist. His conversion dates
apparently from 1858, when the papers by Darwin and Wallace were read at
the Linnean Society. This has always appeared to me remarkable, and T.
H. Huxley {124} has said with regard to his own position:--"My
reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the
'Origin' was, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!'"

After the publication of the _Origin of Species_ Hooker wrote to Darwin,
{125} "I have not yet got half through the book, not from want of will,
but of time--for it is the very hardest book to read, to full profit,
that I ever tried--it is so cram-full of matter and reasoning. . . .
Somehow it reads very different from the MS., and I often fancy that I
must have been very stupid not to have more fully followed it in MS."

Whatever Hooker may have been he was not stupid, and though nowadays it
is easy to feel surprise that his long-continued familiarity with
Darwin's work had not earlier convinced him of the doctrine of evolution
by means of natural selection, we must ascribe it rather to his early
education in the sacrosanct meaning of the word _species_.

I think it must have been roughly about the time of the publication of
the _Origin of Species_ that my earliest memories of Sir Joseph Hooker
refer. I clearly remember his eating gooseberries with us as children,
in the kitchen garden at Down. The love of gooseberries was a bond
between us which had no existence in the case of our uncles, who either
ate no gooseberries or preferred to do so in solitude. By a process of
evolutionary change the word gooseberry took on a new meaning at Down.
Hooker used to send Darwin some especially fine bananas grown in the Kew
hothouses, and these were called Kew gooseberries. It was c