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twenty years the position of director of the Royal Gardens, Kew, Sir 
Joseph Hooker now resigns that post. Though nearly seventy years 
of age, he seems as full of vigor and work as when, forty-five years 
ago, he joined Sir James Ross's Antarctic expedition as assistant 
surgeon in the Erebus and Terror. That voyage yielded a substan- 
tial contribution to botanical science. Not only as a botanist, but as 
a lecturer, he stands in the highest rank. His botanical work during 
his well-known wanderings in the Himalayas is of scarcely less scien- 
tific importance than that of the Antarctic regions, New Zealand and 
Tasmania; while it is difficult to conceive that his Himalayan Jour- 
nals can ever be out of date, either for instruction or entertainment. 
Nor must the journey which he made in Morocco with Mr. John Ball 
be forgotten, and its substantial narrative, not to mention his run 
across America with that most genial of scientists, Prof. Asa Gray. 
No one probably did Darwin more service when working out his 
Origin of Species. As an eager fellow-worker and loyal assistant, few 
probably know the services Sir Joseph rendered to one who was the 
greatest of revolutionists, as well as the foremost of evolutionists. 
But It is as the director of Kew Gardens that Sir Joseph must be 
specially remembered at present. There he has held sway for thirty 
years — ten as his father's assistant and twenty as chief. It is mainly 
due to the Hookers that this royal domain has become the largest and 
finest garden in the world. The director of such an institution can 
have but little of that quiet and unworried leisure which is absolutely 
necessary for the best work in science, and it is this consideration, 
and not any feeling of failing faculties, that determined Sir Joseph to 
resign his trying post at the end of November. 
The Papaiv {Carica papaya). — All students of botany are well ac- 
quainted with the accounts given by travelers of the uses and won- 
derful properties of the fruit of Carica papaya, and most of us have 
read how the application of the juice of this fruit to a piece of tough 
meat will cause a disintegration of its fibres and consequently render 
it tender. Browne, in his Natural History of Jamaica, says that meat 
quickly becomes tender if it is washed in water to which some papaw 
juice has been added, and, if left in siich water for ten minutes, it 
will drop from the spit while roasting, or separate into shreds while 
boiling. ^ It is likewise said that in Barbadoes and other West India 
islands, it was once customary to feed pigs on the green fruit; but it 
was found that if these animals consumed any very large quantity 
without a sufficient proportion of other food, they not only suffered 
in health, but death actually followed in some cases from the intensity 
of the chemical action. Owing to the interest that has^ recently 
sprung up in Europe regarding the chemical action of this fruit, a 
large demand has risen for the. dried juice and the commercial 
papain, both of which have lately been submitted to a new examina- 
tion by Dr. S. H. C. Martin, who records his results in the British 
Medical Journal ioi July 25 th. 
Wurtz had described the ferment of the papaw as a proteid, solu- 
ble in distilled water, yet precipitated by nitric acid, but differing 
from a native albumen (as white of egg) in not being precipitated by 
boiling. In the material used by Dr. Martin in his former experi- 
