SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER PRAIN. 669 



most strongly in the classical essays which date from 1860 to 1866. 

 Without attempting to estimate the interaction effects of the work of 

 Darwin on that of Hooker and vice versa, we may here direct atten- 

 tion to the fact of their existence. Nor could it be otherwise; the 

 two men studied 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 Ms 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. Tins 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 



