330 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
constitutionally buoyant to the last. He had made no small 
progress in the work, and had carried the sheets of the initial 
number through the press, when an attack of diphtheria, then 
epidemic at Kew, suddenly closed his long, honored and most 
useful life. 
Our survey of what Sir William Hooker did for science 
would be incomplete indeed, if it were confined to his pub- 
lished works — numerous and important as they are — and 
the wise and efficient administration through which, in a 
short space of twenty-four years, a Queen’s flower and kit- 
chen -garden and pleasure-grounds have been transformed 
into an imperial botanical establishment of unrivaled interest 
and value. Account should be taken of the spirit in which 
he worked, of the researches and explorations he promoted, 
of the aid and encouragement he extended to his fellow- 
laborers, especially to young and rising botanists, and of the 
means and appliances he gathered for their use no less than 
for his own. 
The single-mindedness with which he gave himself to his 
scientific work, and the conscientiousness with which he lived 
for science while he lived by it, were above all praise. Emi- 
nently fitted to shine in society, remarkably good-looking and 
of the most pleasing address, frank, cordial, and withal of 
a very genial disposition, he never dissipated his time and 
energies in the round of fashionable life, but ever avoided the 
social prominence and worldly distinctions which some sedu- 
lously seek. So that, however it may or ought to be regarded 
in a country where court honors and government rewards have 
a factitious importance, we count it a high compliment to his 
sense and modesty that no such distinctions were ever con- 
ferred upon him in recognition of all that he accomplished 
at Kew. 
Nor was there in him, while standing in a position like that 
oceupied by Banks and Smith in his early days, the least 
manifestation of a tendency to overshadow the science with 
his own importance, or of indifference to its general advance- 
ment. Far from monopolizing even the choicest botanical 
materials which large expenditure of time and toil and money 
