haracteristic
of my father to feel doubts as to whether he ought to receive Royal
bananas from a Royal garden. I wish I could remember Hooker romping with
us as children, of which he somewhere speaks.

It was about this time that Darwin had a fancy to make out the names of
the English grasses, and Hooker wrote, "How on earth you have made out 30
grasses rightly is a mystery to me. You must have a marvellous tact for
appreciating diagnosis." It was at this time that one of Darwin's boys
remarked in regard to a grass he had found:--"I are an extraordinary
grass-finder, and must have it particularly by me all dinner." Strange
to say he did not grow into a botanist.

Hooker's letters at this time impress me with the difficulty he met with
in adapting his systematic work to the doctrines of evolution. He gives
the impression of working at species in a puzzled or discontented frame
of mind. Thus on 1st January 1859, he writes to a
fellow-botanist:--"What I shall try to do is, to harmonise the facts with
the newest doctrines, not because they are the truest, but because they
do give you room to reason and reflect at present, and hopes for the
future, whereas the old stick-in-the-mud doctrines of absolute creations,
multiple creations, and dispersion by actual causes under existing
circumstances, are all used up, they are so many stops to further
enquiry."

A few days later he continues to the same correspondent: "If the course
of migration does not agree with that of birds, winds, currents, etc., so
much the worse for the facts of migration!" On the whole it seems to me
a remarkable fact that Hooker's conversion to evolution was such a slow
affair. As Mr Huxley points out, "The partial light thrown on the
question in fragmentary discussions was not enough, and until 1858-59,
after the consolidation of Darwin's arguments in the famous Abstract
[_The Origin of Species_], Hooker . . . worked avowedly on the accepted
lines of the fixity of species, for which he had so far found no
convincing substitute."

It is pleasant to read Darwin's warm-hearted words: {127a} "You may say
what you like, but you will never convince me that I do not owe you ten
times as much as you can owe me" (30th Dec. 1858).

Hooker's importance in the world was ever on the increase, and this had
also its usual concomitant drawbacks. Huxley wrote to him {127b} on 19th
December 1860: "It is no use having any false modesty about the matter.
You a