668 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



comparable with that on the botany of Syria and Palestine, 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 Prsecursores, one of the 

 most fascinating, whether for the variety of its forms or the intricacy 

 of their relationships, had been the Balsaminese. Since 1859, when 

 then 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 fines 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 circumpolar 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 circumpolar 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 



