349 
I have ever seen it in the Tropics, and all the coast one mass of 
beautiful peaks of snow, and when the sun gets low they reflect 
the most brilliant tints of gold and yellow and scarlet, and then 
to see the dark cloud of smoke tinged with flame rising from the 
volcano in one column, one side jet black and the other reflect- 
ing the colours of the sun, turning off at a right angle by some 
current of wind and extending many miles to leeward; it is a 
sight far exceeding anything I could imagine and which is very 
much heightened by. the idea that we have penetrated far farther 
than was once thought practicable, and there is a sort of awe 
that steals over us all in considering our own total insignificance 
and helplessness.”’ 
Fifty-six years later, when he witnessed the illuminated Fleet 
at Spithead, he declared he had seen but two sights to beat it, 
one was ‘‘the view of the glacier-clothed and berg-imprisoned 
mountain chain of South Victoria Land and Mount Erebus blaz- 
ing in front. The other, the first view of the Himalayas, as seen 
from Darjeeling, covering perhaps 100° of one of the horizons 
with perpetual snow, with Kinchinjunga, 28,000 ft., towering 
over all.’’ 
Hooker was one of those men who had the gift of making 
great and lasting friendships; as a young man he quickly won 
the confidence of men like Sir James Ross and Lord Dalhousie, 
importance e possessed pre-eminently the gift of making 
friends, and his correspondence shows how diligently he kept up 
with the d how warmly they reciprocated his friendship. 
Though in early life he did not enj oy particularly good health, 
his travels in the Antarctic, in the Himalayas, in Morocco, and 
i have hardened him, and he became 
stronger as -life advanced. ‘‘I am stoneware, you know,’’ he 
wrote to Huxley, 
and robust old age, and retained his faculties in a wonderful 
degree to the last. Those who saw him at the Darwin celebrations 
at Cambridge in 1909 found it hard to realize that he was 92 
years of age. 
