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fact which he acquired. On the outward and return voyages, 

 or in the intervals when the season was not favourable for 

 entering the extreme southern seas, the expedition visited 

 Ascension, St Helena, the Cape, New Zealand, Australia, 

 Tasmania, Kerguelen Island, Tierra del Fuego, and the Falk- 

 land Islands. The prime object of the voyage was a magnetic 

 survey, and this determined its course. But it brought this 

 secondary consequence; that Hooker had the chance of observing 

 and collecting upon all the great circumpolar areas of the southern 

 hemisphere. The results he later welded together into his first 

 great work, The Antarctic Flora. 



Very soon after his return from the Antarctic the craving for 

 travel broke out afresh in him. He longed to see a tropical 

 Flora in a mountainous country, and to compare it at different 

 levels with that of temperate and arctic zones. Two alternatives 

 arose before him : the Andes and the Himalaya. He chose 

 the latter, being influenced by promises of assistance from 

 Dr Falconer, the Superintendent of the Calcutta Garden. But 

 before he left England his journey came under the recognition 

 of Government. He not only received grants on the condition 

 that the collections made should be located in the Herbarium at 

 Kew, but he was accredited by the Indian Government to the 

 Rulers, and the British Residents, in the countries whose hitherto- 

 untrodden ways he was to explore. After passing the cold 

 season of 1848 in making himself acquainted with the vegetation 

 of the plains and hills of Western Bengal, he struck north to the 

 Sikkim Himalaya. Hither he had been directed by Lord 

 Auckland and by Dr Falconer, as to ground unbroken by 

 traveller or naturalist. The story of this remarkable journey, 

 its results and its vicissitudes, including the forcible detention 

 of himself and his companion Dr Campbell by a faction of the 

 Court of Sikkim, is to be found in his Himalayan Journals. These 

 most fascinating volumes of travel were published in 1854. They 

 tell how he spent two years in the botanical exploration and 

 topographical survey of the state of Sikkim, and of a number of 

 the passes leading into Thibet ; and how towards the close of 

 1848 he even crossed the western frontier of Sikkim, and ex- 

 plored a portion of Nepal that has never since been open to 



o. B. 20 



