WOKK OF THE ELDEE HOOKEK 15 



plants of Parry's and Sabine's l Arctic voyages and on the 

 botany of Beechey's voyage to Behring Strait, the Pacific, 

 and China, compare with his son's Antarctic and Australian 

 work. His ' Flora Boreali- Americana,' his ' British Flora,' his 

 'Niger Flora ' are paralleled by work in the same fields. His ten 

 books on ferns for he was the leading pteridologist of his 

 time prelude Joseph Hooker's interest in the cryptogams, 

 while the great series of the * Icones Plantarum,' begun in 

 1837 to illustrate new and rare plants selected from the 

 author's herbarium, which later became the nucleus of the 

 great Kew Herbarium, was continued under his son and suc- 

 cessor at Kew, thanks to the bequest left for this purpose 

 by Bentham. 



For the most part this work of his was a labour of love, often 

 involving financial responsibility as well. Generous to others, 

 and enthusiastic for his work, he thought little of his own 

 interests in comparison with the scientific privileges offered 

 by the position at Kew. He drew upon his private means, not 

 only for his books, but for the ceaseless succession of botanical 

 magazines of which he undertook the editorship, in order to 

 secure a channel for recording the immense variety of new 

 facts that came before him as director of large and expanding 

 botanical gardens, facts needing to be set on record, though 

 too scattered and disconnected for publication in anything 

 but a ' miscellany.' 



Joseph Hooker's mother, Maria Turner, brought another 

 strongly marked strain of character and capacity into his 



1 Sir Edward Sabine, K.C.B. (1788-1883), saw active service in the American 

 war of 1812, but after 1816 devoted nearly all his life to science, especially 

 astronomy and terrestrial magnetism. For his researches on these subjects 

 when in the Arctic with Ross and Parry he received the Copley medal in 1821, 

 and subsequently extended his researches half across the world. He, assisted 

 by Ross and others, made the first systematic magnetic survey of the British 

 Isles, and, paying a visit to Berlin, prompted Humboldt to urge the establish- 

 ment of magnetic observatories throughout the British Empire in connection 

 with those already established elsewhere by other Governments, a proposal 

 which led to Ross's Antarctic expedition. Sabine was President of the Royal 

 Society from 1861-71 ; he had been general secretary of the British Associa- 

 tion 1839-59, except in 1852, when he was President. His magnum opus, 

 which included a complete statement of the magnetic survey of the globe, 

 extended over thirty-six years from 1840, in his series of ' Contributions to 

 Terrestrial Magnetism ' in the Philosophical Transactions of the Eoyal Society. 



