2 
Faculty. In the mathematical class he had as a fellow student a 
ad somewhat younger than himself, son of a colleague of his father, 
afterwards to become Lord Kelvin and to follow himself as occupant 
of the chair of President of the Royal Society. As a medical 
student he had as a class-fellow the son of another colleague of his 
father destined like himself to become a distinguished traveller and 
to be his companion on some of his own most interesting and fruitful 
journeys. Hooker completed his medical studies and obtained the 
degree of M.D. at Glasgow in 1839 
While an undergraduate in Glasgow much of Hooker’s spare 
time was given to work in his father’s herbarium ; his reading, as 
he himself has explained, included the study of many works o 
travel, Among the passages, he tells us, which had especially 
impressed him were Turner’s description of the great peak of 
Chumlari in the Eastern Himalaya and the account of the island of 
Kerguelen contained in Cook’s Voyages. The latter he was destined 
to visit himself quite early in his career. At the close of his 
medical curriculum Hooker became an Assistant Surgeon in the 
during the next three years to visit New Zealand, Australia, 
Tasmania, Kerguelen, Tierra del Fuego, and the Falkland Islands. 
Keen and assiduous, he managed to bring together very large 
collections of material and to acquire an extraordinary amount of 
botanical information. While at work on his father’s collections, 
Hooker made his earliest contribution to botanical literature ; 
descriptions by him of three new Mosses from the Himalaya 
were published in the ‘ [cones Plantarum’ in 1837 (vol. ii. p. 194). 
Before starting on the Antarctic voyage, he had prepared in colla- 
boration with Professor Harvey another paper on Indian Mosses. 
his, his second publication, appeared in 1840, while he was absent 
in the southern seas. But if, under paternal inspiration, Hooker thus 
showed an early inclination for the study of Cryptogams, he would 
appear to have simultaneously developed an interest of his own in 
Fossil Botany, because an early contribution to natural knowledge, 
written and published in Tasmania in 1842 while he was botanist to 
the circumpolar expedition, gives the results of the examination of 
specimens of fossil wood from the Macquarie Plains. 
Shortly after his return from the Antarctic expedition Hooker, 
in 1843, became Assistant to Graham, who was still Professor of 
Botany in Edinburgh and held this position until 1845 when Graham 
was succeeded in the chair by the elder Balfour. On the termina- 
tion of his appointment at ain batph Hooker became botanist to 
the Geolegical Survey of Great Britain. This new appointment 
naturally gave a great impetus to his palaeontological interests ; 
while attached to the Survey he made a number of im 
contributions to the literature of Fossil Botany, the most notable of 
these being a discussion of the vegetation of the Carboniferous 
period as compared with that now existing on the globe, which 
appeared in 1848, But his studies during the period of his appoint- 
ment in Edinburgh and of his attachment to the Geological Rarvey 
