598 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



A splendid and illuminating revelation of a generous and too 

 modest character. 



As a concluding item in our necessarily incomplete but representa- 

 tive selection from the long list of Hooker's varied work in and 

 for science, we must cite his action when president of the Royal 

 Society in 1878 in raising a fund of £10,000 (chiefly by subscription 

 from wealthy friends of his own among the Fellows of the Society ) , 

 by which new Fellows were relieved of the large entrance fee and 

 all were in future to pay a reduced annual subscription of only £3. 

 This admirable measure, entirely due to Hookers initiative, had 

 the result that, as Mr. Leonard Huxley writes, " no man henceforth 

 need be kept outside the society on the score of money." Of the 

 many services in economic botany, which under his direction Kew 

 rendered and continues to render to distant parts of the Empire, 

 we have no space to say more than that they comprise the intro- 

 duction from South America to India of the quinine plant, and of 

 the rubber tree (Hevea), and the scientific supervision of the culti- 

 vation in the West Indies of the neglected sources of wealth — the 

 sugar cane, tobacco, and Jamaica oranges. 



When we examine, as the Life and Letters and our own observa- 

 tion of him enable us to do, the personal qualities which carried 

 Hooker through his exceptionally long life with such splendid 

 success, such unfailing spirit and contentment, and such lasting 

 benefit to humanity (he was, we learn, selected by the Japanese, soon 

 after his death, as " one of the 29 heroes of the world that modern 

 time has produced"), we find that the emergence of those qualities 

 was not due to heredity alone, but largely to the training which they 

 received from a gifted and affectionate father, for whom he had 

 profound sympathy and filial devotion. Hooker was born with a 

 vigorous constitution and great physical endurance. He had an 

 inborn tenacity of purpose and single-minded attitude to life, and 

 was as remarkable for his frank honesty as for his courage. He 

 inherited from his father and his maternal grandfather (both 

 botanists) his aptitude for botanical science, but it was the teaching 

 and example of his father which, from his earliest years, trained 

 and developed that aptitude. He modestly but with characteristic 

 insight said of himself when at the age of 70 he received the Copley 

 medal of the Royal Society, that he had no genius, no exceptional 

 powers or exceptional talent, but that he possessed that inward 

 motive power — some heat, some fervor, which compels vis to exercise 

 our faculties and to ripen the fruits of our labors — which he would 

 call "the wish to do well," expressed in the modest motto chosen 

 for himself 400 years ago by Prince Henry the Navigator, " Talent 

 de bien faire." 



