272 THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN BOTANY. 



The luxuriant plant life in Madeira was a great joy to him ; yet he was 

 no less happy in desolate Kerguelen's Land. As a small child he used to 

 look at a picture of this place, when sitting on his grandfather's knee and 

 turning over the beloved pages of Cook's Voyages. The picture showed a 

 strange arched rock, and the sailors killing penguins ; and he thought he 

 would be the happiest boy alive if everhe could see that wonderful rock and 

 knock penguins on the head. The island is storm-swept, and the hill-tops 

 were always covered with ice and snow, the vegetation is scanty, consist- 

 ing largely of cryptogams, but Hooker collected every day of the two months' 

 stay, and exclaims in a letter home *• " You cannot conceive the delight 

 which the new discoveries afforded as they slowly revealed themselves, 

 though in many cases it was all I could do to collect from the frozen ground 

 as much as would serve to identify a species .... Many of my best 

 little Lichens were gathered by hammering out the tufts or sitting on them 

 till they thawed." Lichens painted the rocks from the water's edge to the 

 summit of the hills. And there they appeared like a miniature forest grow- 

 ing on the flat rocks : one was of a delicate lilac colour, another bright 

 yellow, and another tinged whole caves near the sea with'a light red. Much 

 interest was taken .in the so-called Kerguelen Cabbage (Pringle's anti- 

 scorbutica) discovered by Cook and eaten to prevent scurvy : Hooker 

 grew it from seed and planted it on the Falkland Islands elsewhere. 



At St. Helena he was greatly interested in what was afterwards called 

 " the struggle for existence " between the native and imported plants and 

 animals. 



Arriving at Cape Horn just as winter ended, he thought the climate 

 had been much abused, for spring came with a rush in ten days : " the 

 Berberry flowered with bright golden blossoms, the tufts of Misodendrons 

 on the beeches grew quite brilliant, and the crumply-leaved beech burst at 

 every twig, emitting a delicious resinous smell." But in a few days snow 

 came down, and thence forward clouds and fogs, rain and snow, justified all 

 Darwin' s descriptions (in the Voyage of the Beagle) of the dreary Fuegian 

 summer. 



Within the Arctic Circle, Hooker dredged for sea-animals and made 

 drawings and studies of them, as there was no work for a botanist. Even a 

 seaweed was only found here once, and at Cockburn Island one sole lichen 

 was found, painting the rocks with red and orange, — a lichen which is 

 abundant also in the Arctic regions. Hooker was destined to find 

 it again, to his surprise, at 19,000 ft. in tbe Himalayas, where " my most 

 Antarctic plant, Lecanora miniata" forms once more the only vegetation 

 at an extreme limit of vegetable life, and stains the rocks so as to show 

 them orange-red at a distance of five miles, exactly as on Cockburn 

 Island. 



Although unable to reach the position of the South Magnetic pole, 

 Capt. Ross discovered the great Barrier and the sea which bears his name, 

 and the members of his expedition were the first to see the wonderful 

 volcano named after his ship Erebus. 



Hooker's letters on this expedition show how much more he was 

 than a collector and systematist," for he was constantly considering 

 the significance of the facts he noted, especially the distribution of 

 the species; and his Flora Antarctica and the separate floras of New 

 Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia, etc., which he afterwards published 

 suggest far-reaching problems. He was impressed with the idea that 

 there must have been an ancient southern continent from which forms 

 had spread to places now so disconnected as New Zealand and Chili, where 



