PiiOOJSEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



greatly excelled, while Lindley traversed a wider field, and grappled 

 with abstruser problems in every department of the science, always 

 with confidence and facility, but not with unvarying success. 



William Jackson Hooker was born on the 6th of July, 1785, at 

 Norwich, where resided Sir James Edward Smith, the possessor of the 

 Linnaean herbarium, and a leading botanist of the time. It was he, 

 probably, who directed young Hooker's attention to botany ; but his 

 fondness for natural history, especially for ornithology, was already de- 

 veloped in the school-boy. Going up to London as a young man, he 

 made the acquaintance of Sir Joseph Banks and of the able botanists 

 he had drawn around him ; in the year 1809 he went to Iceland ; on 

 his return from a successful exploration, the vessel in which he had 

 embarked with all his collections, notes, and drawings, was fired and 

 everything was lost, save the lives of the crew and passengers. In 1811 

 he published his earliest work, the " Journal of a Tour in Iceland " ; be- 

 fore 1820, he had brought out his monograph of the British Junger- 

 manniece, and the Muscologia Britannica, both illustrated by his own 

 pencil. From 1820 to 1840 he filled, with distinguished success, the 

 chair of the Regius Professorship of Botany at the University of Glas- 

 gow ; and he brought out, during these twenty most active years, the 

 greater part of his extensive writings upon Phsenogamous Botany, 

 among which we should especially notice his Flora Boreali- Americana, 

 or Botany of British America, founded on the collections of the Arctic 

 explorers, and of his correspondents in Canada and Western North 

 America, including what is now Oregon and Washington Territory. 



In the year 1841, when it was determined that the gardens and 

 plant-houses at Kew, then crown domain, should be converted into 

 a great national establishment, Doctor, now Sir William Hooker, was 

 naturally looked to as the proper person to take charge of it. He ac- 

 cepted the trust, and, generously supported by the government under 

 every administration, he devoted his energies and rare talents for organ- 

 ization to the creation and development of the conservatories, museums, 

 gardens, and plantations, stocked with the vegetable productions of all 

 lands, which (including also the vast and unrivalled herbarium that he 

 had himself amassed) have, within the short space of a quarter of a cen- 

 tury, made Kew the botanical metropolis of the world. 



All this he did without much abatement of his activity in botanical 

 investigation and authorship ; although of late years restricting his 

 proper studies very much to the Ferns. His most comprehensive work 



