10 EAELY DAYS 



in 1816, and, as will be seen hereafter, his son, finding any on 

 his travels, never fails to mention the fact in his letters home. 



In his earlier days, William Hooker travelled afield botanis- 

 ing in Scotland and the Isles, no slight undertaking in 1807 

 and 1808 ; and in 1809 made his celebrated voyage to Iceland, 

 where he witnessed a bloodless revolution (see p. 108), and on 

 his homeward way lost his collections and all but lost his life 

 by the burning of his ship. But he was unable to carry out 

 his wider plans of visiting Ceylon and Java, S. Africa and Brazil, 

 though he visited France, where he made acquaintance with the 

 great botanists in Paris and Switzerland, a centre of botanical 

 and geological interest. 



In 1815 he married Maria, the eldest daughter of his friend 

 Dawson Turner, and at his father-in-law's advice, embarked 

 his remaining fortune in a brewery, in which the Turners and 

 Fagets were interested. This promised to recoup the loss of 

 large sums which he had sunk in the bottomless depths of the 

 Spanish Funds. It was an enterprise, however, for which his 

 aptitudes were little suited, and the business went steadily 

 down. But this loss of fortune was the beginning of his greater 

 career. Had the friendly alliance of Hooker, Turner, and Paget 

 prospered, he would have remained an amateur if a distin- 

 guished amateur in science, and would never have achieved 

 the special eminence which was to shape his son's career and 

 be continued in it. A growing family and diminishing revenue 

 made him look out for some botanical post that should both give 

 scope to his special powers and bring in an income. Through 

 the influence of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, 1 botanist, explorer, 



1 Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), President of the Royal Society, became 

 a botanist in a burst of schoolboy enthusiasm. His ample inheritance enabled 

 him to travel and to become a munificent patron of science. His most famous 

 expedition was that with Captain Cook in the Endeavour, when he took with 

 him, at his own expense, Dr. Solander, the pupil of Linnaeus, two draughtsmen, 

 and two attendants. In 1778 he was elected P.R.S., and held the office till 

 his death, exercising a generous but rather autocratic sway over the scientific 

 world, for whom his great collections and library were always open, and his 

 house in Soho Square a gathering point. He left his library and herbarium 

 to Robert Brown, his librarian, for life, with reversion to the British Museum, 

 not only leaving him 200 a year, but providing for the famous draughtsman, 

 Franjis Bauer, during his life, that he might continue his drawings from new 

 plants at Kew. As scientific adviser to George III, he also arranged for 

 collectors to gather plants for Kew from abroad. 



