266 KEW : 1879-1885 



help saying that he reminded me of a man, who being never 

 sea -sick himself, would not believe that there was any such 

 thing in others. 



Sir E. Temple spoke absurdly in praise of the paper, 

 talking most ignorantly as if no one had written on the 

 Himalayan chain before. So I took the liberty of reminding 

 him that such men as General Strachey, Hodgson, Thomson, 

 and many more had told us all about the Himalaya that Mr. 

 Graham had, though none had performed the same plucky 

 exploits, or ascended nearly as high. 



His youngest son was born in January 1885. To Asa Gray 

 he writes playfully of his bearing the name of his * Judicious ' 

 ancestor, and the paternal inheritance of a skull sloping up 

 high behind, a shape so fashionable among one of the western 

 coast tribes of Eedskins, that they press their infants' heads 

 between boards to produce it in the extremest form. 



To Asa Gray 



February 15, 1885. 



We have returned to Kew, with the new child christened 

 Bichard, my wife's whim, I don't approve ; ten to one 

 he won't be ' judicious ' at all, all the more as his cranium 

 is just like mine, i.e. like a Chinook's, tremendously long 

 from chin to occiput (sketch) facsimile. 



I wish when you go North, you or Mrs. Gray would get 

 made for me a Chinook flattener to work the other (back) 

 way, and I will ask my wife to clap it on for a year or two 

 and see if I can't make him judicious. 



Early in October 1885, soon after his sixty-eighth birthday, 

 Hooker resolved to resign the Directorship of Kew, retiring 

 from office at the end of November. He had held the post for 

 twenty years, and for ten years before that had been his 

 father's assistant, gradually taking more and more of the 

 burden of administration upon his own shoulders. Now, 

 though the enormously increased work, scientific and adminis- 

 trative, was divided with his assistant, ' fhe world,' in his shape, 

 * was too much with him,' laying waste the hours he would fain 

 have devoted to that lifelong work, the Indian Flora. Now, 



