PREFACE 



There seems to be, if I may be allowed to say so, a touch of 

 personal appropriateness in the fact that the writing of Sir 

 Joseph Hooker's Life has fallen to the son of his close friend. 

 The work has thus been doubly a labour of love and re- 

 membrance, and by good fortune it traverses a biographical 

 field some part of which has already been worked over by me. 

 If, however, I cannot claim to be a professed student of botany, 

 something of my defect has been remedied by the kindness 

 of others. The proofs have been most carefully read through 

 by Sir David Prain, the present Director of Kew, and Miss 

 Matilda Smith, Kew's botanical artist, who moreover has 

 verified many references at Kew and supphed material for 

 biographical notes not easily accessible elsewhere. 



Sir Joseph Hooker, for all that he accused himself on 

 occasion of being a bad correspondent, was in reality an 

 indefatigable letter writer. Indeed, he declares somewhere 

 that the busier he was, the longer and fuller his letters were 

 likely to be — and he was always busy. Apart from a vast 

 official correspondence and regular weekly letters to various 

 members of his family, there are extant over 700 sheets copied 

 from his letters to Charles Darwin, whose own share of the 

 correspondence, typed out, fiUs more than 800 pages. No other 

 single correspondence compares with this ; but it is easily 

 balanced by the total of letters to the next half dozen or 

 so among his multitudinous correspondents, to name only 

 Bentham and Harvey, Anderson and La Touche, Mr. Duthie 

 and my father. Add to this his journals of travel, his various 

 books, his scientific essays — ^the first written at nineteen, the 



