668 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
comparable with that on the botany of Syria and Palestme, written 
30 years earlier. 
The active intellect which had for five and sixty years taken a fierce 
delight in laborious days, and had throughout found a task to be 
more congenial in proportion to its difficulty, was not likely to seek 
satisfaction in an unbroken round of quiet breathing. If new worlds 
need not be sought for conquest, at least some unregulated province 
might be reduced to order. Among the families of Indian plants 
dealt with by Hooker and Thomson in their Preecursores, one of the 
most fascinating, whether for the variety of its forms or the intricacy 
_of their relationships, had been the Balsaminer. Since 1859, when 
their paper appeared, a host of new Indian and Chinese forms had 
been reported; the characters met with in some of these appeared to 
invalidate earlier conclusions. To the study of this interesting group 
Hooker devoted his attention from 1904 onward, evolving order out 
of an apparent chaos, and in the course of his studies placed those 
in charge of most of the important herbaria in Europe under a deep 
obligation by supplying them with a uniform nomenclature for their 
specimens. On this work, which, so far at least as the Asiatic forms 
are concerned, had been practically completed, Hooker was engaged 
almost to the last. 
Shortly summarized, and omitting here any reference to excursions 
into the domain of economic, morphological, and physiological 
botany, or to systematic studies of material from countries in which 
he did not himself travel, we find evidence of the existence of several 
definite lines of active interest, athwart which fell the shadow of 
various outstanding events in Hooker’s career. The record indicates 
that Hooker’s strongest and earliest predilections were perhaps toward 
the study of cryptogamic plants and work on fossil botany. The 
first predilection reached its culmination in 1844, when he returned 
from the cireumpolar expedition on which he had started in 1839. 
The pressure exercised by problems, to the elucidation of which the 
evidence of flowering plants with their more special organization and 
more restricted distribution is of greater value, gradually led to the 
abandonment of this field of study, which was not reentered after 
he left for India in 1847. The predilection for work on fossil botany 
naturally reached its culmination while Hooker was attached to the 
geological survey. Its influence, though not entirely inhibited, was 
less active after Hooker’s return from the East, and this field of study 
was abandoned when he became assistant director of Kew in 1855. 
The predilection for the study of those problems that relate to the 
origination and distribution of species, to which his experience as a 
field naturalist on cireumpolar islands and among the peaks and 
valleys of the Himalayas had given so great an impetus, reached its 
culmination while he was assistant director at Kew, and is manifested 
