SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER—PRAIN. 669 
= eaterla pepe arin which date from 1860 to 1866. 
> eae 2 hee it the interaction effects of the work of 
tion to the fact of thei ae Sail ea eesibes ey. here direct atten 
Seat elr existence. Nor could it be otherwise; the 
i n studie and wrote; on terms of intimate and affectionate 
friendship, in an atmosphere surcharged with great and pregnant 
thought. = 
With Hooker's succession to the directorship of Kew in 1865, the 
Antarctic work had practically ended, for the concluding moiety of 
the New Zealand handbook appeared in 1867. He was now able to 
do for India what he had already done for Tasmania and New Zea- 
land, and if, when he retired in 1885, only half of his Indian systematic 
work had been accomplished, there was no break in its continuity. 
If we except his masterly sketch of the vegetation of India, prepared 
after the Indian Flora had been completed, we are without a record 
of his conclusions from Indian botanical evidence, comparable with 
the brilliant generalizations based on his study of the Arctic, Ant- 
arctic, and insular floras of the globe. This may be a cause for regret; 
it can be no cause for surprise. Not only is the Indian field the wider 
of the two; Hooker completed the essential preliminary spadework 
in the other during the 16 years between 1844 and 1860, whereas the 
corresponding Indian toil exacted over 40 years of labor between 1854 
and 1897. When the Indian preliminary work was done, it only 
served to prove that the relationships of the Indian, Malayan, and 
Chinese floras are so intimate as to demand their conjoint considera- 
tion. 
The completion of the Indian Flora in 1897, rather than the demis- 
sion of the directorship at Kew, marks the close of a period in Hooker’s 
work. The next epoch, a comparatively brief one, was devoted to 
the performance of acts of piety to the memory and regard for the 
wishes of predecessors or of contemporaries whom he had outlived. 
These tasks ended, the evening of his life was devoted by Hooker to 
work which in many respects was, even for one so wide in his range 
and so varied in his interests, a new departure. His great Antarctic 
Flora, his still greater Indian one, are splendid examples of broad 
canvases upon which in bold and striking lines the hand of a master 
has depicted the salient and essential features of a highly diversified 
landscape, and no one has ever portrayed with a surer touch. In 
the work to which Hooker devoted the closing years of his life, he 
has treated a single natural family as a precious gem, upon which, 
with a hand as sure as the one that has given us the ample atmosphere 
of his great pictures, he has engraved an exquisite intaglio. 
To offer here an estimate of the quality of Hooker’s work would 
surely be out of place. That task has already been performed in 
the pages of Nature by one who was in the strictest sense Hooker's 
