10 ECONOMIC BOTANY AND THE NEW FLOEAS 



After reporting official sympathy with this view in his next 

 letter, he urges on June 4 : 



I am most anxious about the future of your Garden and 

 take care to ventilate it everywhere. Kidderpore all agree 

 is a capital idea [a site was available there] Alipore way 

 was always my view since 1847. Do not frighten the 

 Govt. by too great demands. My Father's plan always 

 was to ask for so much of one thing at a time as could 

 be done and form a complete affair by itself ; the next year 

 another, and so on. It would be most advisable that you 

 came home for a short leave to take hints from European 

 Gardens. This would commit the Govt. to move. 



In 1867 he is ' heartily glad to find that there is another 

 Student of Botany in South Africa a Colony which I think 

 boasts of more than any other.' This was Mr. Harry Bolus, 

 already mentioned, with whom he exchanged plants and seeds. 

 But there was a limit to the powers of Kew. Collating doubt- 

 ful species took time, and no one at Kew was so familiar with 

 Cape botany as to distinguish common from scarce plants or to 

 name off hand. Therefore let his correspondent mark those 

 specimens only of which he has any doubt not sending more 

 than twenty or thirty at a time. 



' You must expect now and then a difference of opinion,' 

 he writes, ' as to the species : we work from dried specimens, 

 you from fresh, and we have each much to learn from one 

 another.' (September 9, 1867.) 



On his father's death in 1865, Hooker had taken up the corres- 

 pondence with Sir Henry Barkly, then Governor of Mauritius, 

 where there was a fine Botanical Garden. Sir Henry was a 

 keen botanist, and Lady Barkly a collector of ferns. A packet 

 of ferns which she had sent to be named had to stand over awhile 

 for ' we have now no one at Kew capable of naming Ferns.' 

 Early next year, however, as the post of Assistant Director had 

 been abolished on Hooker's accession to the Directorship, an 

 additional assistant in the Herbarium was sanctioned, and 

 ' I have my eye on a man who will take Ferns in hand.' Mean- 

 while Lady Barkly's ' Pteridomania ' would be ' remembered 

 when we have a distribution of duplicates at Kew.' 



