COLONIAL BOTANIC GAEDENS 477 



inconceivable ! To test these a small laboratory should be 

 attached to the Gardens, where duly qualified amateurs 

 might work, as at Kew, Ceylon, Java, &c., &c. 



Australia possesses five liberally supported Botanical 

 Gardens all I think with laboratories and libraries attached. 



The Cape is now rivalling Australia in glorious fruit 

 Gardens, and it is earnestly to be hoped that it will not 

 remain long without a Botanical Garden. 



Sincerely yours, 



Jos. D. HOOKER. 



As the Antarctic had been the first great interest of his 

 life, so, after the lapse of seventy-two years, it occupied his 

 last correspondence. This was with his ' brother Antarctic,' 

 Dr. Bruce, with whom he had formed a warm personal as well 

 as scientific friendship, after his return from the South ; backing 

 his first application, in 1909, for a Treasury grant towards 

 the working out of his valuable scientific results, and when he 

 set forth on a new expedition to Spitsbergen, speeding him 

 with wishes for all success and safe return. 



Then, in 1911, Dr. Brace wrote his ' Polar Exploration,' 

 and ultimately dedicated the book to Hooker, for the latter, 

 having consented to look over the account of Eoss's voyage, 

 not only suggested various points from his unique knowledge 

 of the circumstances, but offered to do the same for the rest 

 of the proofs. The official account of the voyage hardly made 

 clear, for example, that Eoss and Hooker were the only 

 collectors of marine invertebrate organisms throughout the 

 Expedition. 



Hooker also arranged to send a number of illustrations 

 and mementoes of the Eoss Voyage to a Polar exhibition 

 which Dr. Bruce was getting up in Edinburgh, including a 

 plaster medallion of Eoss, ' an excellent likeness by a young 

 artist, brother of one of the officers (Smith) of the Erebus, 

 who died young in Australia, I think ' ; a medallion of Sir 

 John Eichardson, and portraits of Eoss and Franklin, of 

 Davis, the second master, and Lyall, the assistant surgeon, 

 of the Terror, besides pictures of the perilous collision of the 

 two ships, and scenes in the Eoss Sea and off the Barrier, some 



