274 THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN BOTANY. 



worked were often badly preserved, badly mounted, and without notes, even 

 of the colour of the flowers. He insisted much upon the necessity for 

 observation in the field. Comparing the Indian with the Australian flora, 

 he remarked that many typical forms from the Indian tropics exist in 

 Australia, but no Australian plants seem to have found their way to India, 

 although the eucalyptus flourishes when planted on Indian soil. 



After his return from India, Joseph Hooker became his father's assist- 

 ant at Kew, and it was not until 1860 that he undertook another botanical 

 expedition. This was to Palestine and the results of his travels there 

 were afterwards condensed into a masterly sketch of the Botany of Syria 

 and Palestine for Smith's Bible Dictionary. His chief ambition was to 

 ascend Mount Lebanon and examine the Cedars, comparing them with the 

 Indian deodars. He found them decadent, no seedling being apparently 

 able to survive the present dry climate, so that all the existing trees were 

 from 50 to 500 years old. At 3,000 to 4,000 feet, he found the Lebanon 

 scenery "Tibetan and wretched", and above 8,000 feet, the vegetation 

 was extremely scanty. There was but one alpine or arctic plant, Oxyria 

 reniformis, and that grew only at the summit and was very rare '• he con- 

 cluded that this indicates the same change of climate as is shown by the 

 cedars, and that other arctics which probably existed there in earlier times 

 when the climate was more moist have been expelled by the increasing 

 drought. Their absence is characteristic of the mountains of Asia Minor 

 also and of Morocco as Hooker himself found later. The Cedars of Leba- 

 non he strongly held to be of the same species as the Indian Deodars, these 

 being two extreme forms of one extinct type and their difference of habit 

 due to the contrasted climates of dry Lebanon and humid Himalaya, espe- 

 cially as he had seen the two forms growing side by side at Dropmore and 

 looking quite alike. His paper on the whole genus includes observations on 

 the Cedars of Algeria, Lebanon, the Taurus, and India. 



Eleven years later, in 1871, Hooker went to botanize in Morocco, look, 

 ing forward to " tasting the delights of savagery again", and fufilling 

 another childish ambition, inspired by Mungo Park's Travels, of ascend- 

 ing the Great Atlas. He found it politic to pose as- the hakim and 

 gardener of the Great Sultana Victoria, and the people believed he was 

 searching for a herb which would enable her to live for ever ! Here the 

 labour of collecting and of drying in the moist atmosphere, would have 

 been " almost intolerable, but for the compensating pleasures ". Often 

 his collaborator Ball would work by their one candle till about 2 a.m., and 

 then Hooker would take up the task until morning. He decided that the 

 flora of the Atlas was the dying out of the European flora, and the differ- 

 ence on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar emphasised the antiquity 

 of the severance. 



Hooker's last botanical expedition, undertaken at the age of sixty, 

 was made in company with Asa Gray, who was five or six years older, but 

 the two elderly botanists were indefatigable in their survey of the North 

 American flora, although their journey from East to West included an 

 ascent of a peak 14,500 feet high in the Rockies, where for five hours they 

 had to force their way through thick forest, and a ten days' wagon journey 

 across the Sierra Nevada to the Yosemite Valley. The two problems which 

 they were most anxious to solve were Gray's of the connection between the 

 plants of the Eastern States with those of East Asia and Japan, and 

 Hooker's of the hard line of division between the Arctic flora of America 

 and Greenland. They agreed that both might have resulted from a glacial 

 period and a former connection with an Arctic continent. The warm- 

 climate types of plants now found in North Polar regions as fossils had 



