' A BOEN MUSCOLOGIST ' 3 



ing helper, his keen critic, and ultimate convert in the light of 

 his own work and the material he could so abundantly furnish. 



The story of Joseph Hooker's life-work is, in one aspect, 

 the history of the share taken by botany in establishing the 

 theory of evolution and the effect produced upon it by accept- 

 ance of that theory. He began with unrivalled opportunities, 

 and made unrivalled use of them. As a botanist, he was 

 born in the purple, for in the realm of botany his father, Sir 

 William Hooker, was one of the chief princes, and he had at hand 

 his father's splendid herbarium and the botanic garden which he 

 had made one of the scientific glories of Glasgow University. 



Joseph Hooker's earliest recollections are preserved in an 

 autobiographical fragment, set down late in his life. Note- 

 worthy among the events that emerge from childish forgetful- 

 ness, like hill-tops above a sea of mist, is the early love of nature 

 and especially of plants, inborn in him and indeed inherited 

 from both lines of his parentage. His father and his mother's 

 father were both botanists, and singularly enough they both 

 began their studies as such with the mosses, quite independently 

 of one another ; so that, being confessedly ' a born Muscologist,' 

 he playfully dubs himself ' the puppet of Natural Selection.' 1 



I was born [he writes] June 80, 1817, at Halesworth, 

 Suffolk, being the second child and son of William Jackson 

 Hooker and Maria, nee Turner, of Great Yarmouth. My 

 brother was older than myself and my parents had sub- 

 sequently three daughters. I was named Joseph after my 

 Grandfather Hooker, and Dalton after my godfather, the 

 Kev. James Dalton, M.A., F.L.S., Eector of Croft, York- 

 shire, a student of carices and mosses and discoverer of 

 Scheuchzeria in England. 



My memory reverts to a very early age when only three 

 years old to my father's house at Halesworth, and inci- 

 dents connected therewith, amongst others the gardener, in 

 mowing a damp meadow behind the house, slicing the frogs 

 with his scythe, and my brother running along the top of 

 the garden wall to my mother's alarm. He died in 1840. 

 Curiously enough I have no recollection of a magnificent dog, 



1 Anniversary dinner of the Royal Society, Nov. 30, 1887. 



