SIR JOSEPH HOOKER LANKESTER. 595 



ing the doctrine which has its last expression in Dyer's essay read before the 

 geograph. society and referred to in my last It. S. address (1879). 



The conclusions at present held on this great subject, which so long 

 occupied Hooker's attention as well as that of his friends Darwin and 

 Wallace, are fully and admirably stated by Hooker's son-in-law and 

 successor at Kew in his article on the "Distribution of Plants" in 

 the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica — an essay which 

 permanently associates the name of Sir William Thiselton Dyer 

 with those of Hooker and Darwin as a great master in this many- 

 sided field of scientific speculation. 



While Hooker never ceased to carry on by his own individual work 

 and that of his staff the preparation and publication of systematic 

 "floras" of all parts of the British Empire, with a view to a full 

 understanding of the origin of species and their geographical distri- 

 bution (perhaps we should reverse the order of those terms), his 

 botanical work was by no means limited to this. The "Life" gives a 

 full picture of his activities, which we may briefly summarize by 

 mentioning some of his publications, while his letters, there repro- 

 duced, to his father, to Lyell, Darwin, Harvey (of Dublin) , Bentham, 

 Bryan Hodgson, Asa Gray, Huxley, Paget, and a host of other 

 friends and fellow-workers, reveal the methods of his scientific work 

 as well as his aims and struggles, the steps of his official and public 

 career, and his family life. From them, too, we can gather his views 

 not only on scientific problems, but on art, literature, politics, educa- 

 tion, and religion. 



From the long list of his works (other than those already cited) we 

 select first that on The Ehododendrons of Sikkim-Hinialaya (1849- 

 1851), edited by his father from material sent home by him while 

 he was away collecting, drawing and mapping in the Himalayas. It 

 is a sample of the beauty of form and color which entrances the true 

 naturalist, however austere may be his devotion (as was Hooker's) 

 to pure science. He writes: 



It is a far grander and better book than even I expected. * * * All the 

 Indian world is in love with my Rhododendron book. 



Then we have his Himalayan Journals; or Notes of a Naturalist 

 in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, 

 etc., (1854, reissued 1905), a book like Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle 

 and Wallace's Malay Archipelago for all to read and enjoy; his 

 Students' Flora of the British Islands (1870), which has run through 

 three editions; and his Primer of Botany (1876), which has been 

 reprinted 20 times in three editions — "the rashest and most profitable 

 of all my undertakings," as he called it in a letter to Asa Gray. His 

 paper "On the Diatomaceous Vegetation of the Antarctic Ocean" 



