SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER PRAIN. 665 



Hooker's succession in that year to the directorship of Kew brought 

 with it all the responsibilities connected with the administration of 

 that national institution. These, however, did not prevent him from 

 continuing to take his share in the preparation of the Genera Plan- 

 tarum, the second volume of which was completed in 1876, the third 

 and concluding one in 1883. The directorship, however, brought 

 with it the duties of continuing the Botanical Magazine and the 

 Icones Plantarum, edited by his predecessor. These duties Hooker 

 continued to fulfill even after his retirement in 1885; in the case of 

 the Icones until 1889, in that of the Magazine until 1902, and with 

 the collaboration of Mr. W. B. Hemsley for two years longer, his con- 

 nection with this historic serial ending in 1904, with the completion 

 of the one hundred and thirtieth volume. The death of his father 

 imposed on Hooker yet another filial duty of the most arduous char- 

 acter, that of replacing in 1870, by his own Student's Flora, the 

 British Flora of his predecessor. In 1873 he annotated and rear- 

 ranged the natural families of plants in an English version of the 

 Traite* general of Le Maout and Decaisne, and in 1876 he wrote for 

 the series of science primers that on Botany. 



The results of Hooker's journeys in North Africa in 1871 are given 

 in A Journal of a Tour in Marocco and the Great Atlas, written in 

 collaboration with Ball and published in 1873j those of his visit to 

 North America in 1877 were summarized by himself in Nature, vol. 

 16, p. 539. 



Of the addresses and discourses delivered by Hooker during this 

 period, that on Insular Floras of 1866 has already been alluded to. 

 That delivered from the president's chair to the British Association 

 in 1868, with its whole-hearted advocacy of an acceptance of the 

 hypothesis of Mr. Darwin as the surest means of promoting natural 

 knowledge, was perhaps more important in -its effect on scientific 

 thought generally. His British Association sectional address of 1874, 

 on The Carnivorous Habits of Plants, was an illuminating review of 

 those problems to which his own observations and researches on 

 Nepenthes in 1859 had directed attention. 



It has recently been remarked that "so broad-based were the foun- 

 dations of Kew as laid by Sir William Hooker that they have been 

 but little extended by his followers. Their work has been to build a 

 noble superstructure. Viewed in detail, Kew is hardly anywhere 

 the same as it was in 1865. But the framework is very much the 

 same." These remarks are so just that no useful purpose could be 

 served by any attempt to enumerate here the various manifestations 

 of Hooker's activity as an administrator, or to detail the alterations 

 and additions which marked his directorship. That activity, as was 

 said by Prof. Asa Gray in the article on Hooker in our Scientific 

 Worthies series (Nature, vol. 16, p. 538), was exercised "in such 



