LIXNBAX SOCIETY OF LOXDON. 55 



probably attributable to advice from Hooker, for I don't think 

 such an idea would ever have occurred to him spontaneously I 

 And also by this (1871): — 



" 1 am poauding the Board to get an Assistant for Smith, who 

 can hardly stagger along under his loads of duties of all sorts," 



In those days Kew was under the lioard of Works, and later 

 Hooker had a good deal of trouble with one of the ParUamentary 

 heads. It is no use raking over this old controversy ; suffice to 

 say that Hooker more than held his own and was victorious in the 

 end. I imagine no man was less toleraut of dictation and unin- 

 teUigent interference than Hooker. Daring the seventies of last 

 century there was a local agitation — doubtless promoted by the 

 owners of houses along the Richmond Road — to have the brick 

 wall which enclosed the Grardens on this .side replaced by iron 

 railings. Hooker's reply was to add another five or six feet to the 

 height of this wall for a considerable part of its length, and so it 

 remains to the present day. 



I iiave heard the term "hasty" applied to Hooker, but cannot 

 say how far it is justified. It may have been the " defect" of his 

 x^uality for sound and rapid generalisation. Darwin in one of his 

 letters reproaches Hooker for being " down " on second-rate men, 

 and there is no doubt that Hooker used to express himself em- 

 phatically as to bad craftsmanship or waste of time. 



C is not doing any good. He is putting out for Mueller 



bad specimens of the commonest garden things and putting them 

 up in clumsy parcels that I am ashamed to send out" *. 



It will be realised how annoyed Hooker must have been with 



the wretched C , for lie himself not infrequently sent out 



plants with his own hands — a habit acquired on his travels. My 

 father tells me that the very first time he ever met Hooker, on the 

 occasion of his arrival at Kew in 1858, he found him making up 

 such parcels to send av.ay in the little room on the i-ight of the 

 Herbarium door. 



The period of Hooker's Directorship included numerous publica- 

 tions of value to systematic botany, of which the 'Genera Plantarum' 

 was in many ways the most important and indispensable. In this 

 great work, undertaken in conjunction with George Bentham, the 

 whole of the genera of flowering plants were diagnosed and 

 delimited; its publication extending from 1863 to 1882. To 

 Hooker, of course, systematic botany was not an end in itself but 

 an essential instrument in the solution of the higher problems, the 

 laws that control evolution and dispersal of species, and the rela- 

 tion of physical changes and geology to these laws. 



Hooker never lost his taste for travel nor failed to make oppor- 

 tunity for it. Among his minor and later journeys may be 

 mentioned his trip to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in 1871. 

 His travelling companions were John Ball, the famous alpinist, and 

 'George Maw, well-known for his elaborate monograph on the genus 



* Letter dated 1871. 



