CHAPTEK XLI 



RETIREMENT, TO 1897 : BOTANICAL WORK 



Hooker was now sixty-eight. With his ' Tusculum ' ready- 

 to move into, it did not take long to settle down to the purely 

 scientific work the completion of which was the main object 

 of his retirement. This was an ordinary man's full work, 

 but in the first expansion of relief from official burdens he 

 writes to Huxley, then slowly recovering from a severe break- 

 down, as though such work were mere idleness : 'lam glad 

 to hear you are lazy ; it keeps me in countenance. My indo- 

 lence is, as the Yankees say, phenomenal.' (May 3, 1886.) 



For many years he journeyed to Kew three or four times 

 a week and spent the day working in the Herbarium. Old 

 age was slow to shackle his energies ; he was ninety-three 

 before he confessed, ' I am getting very lazy in my old age.' 

 But at eighty-two he was ' younger than ever ■ ; 'I often 

 feel,' he exclaims, ' that I have no business to be so well as 

 I am,' and it was only after thirty years' familiar indifference 

 to the vagaries of an intermittent pulse, that at eighty-three 

 he yielded to his doctor's orders not to travel alone. But 

 this was of less concern to him than his slowly increasing 

 deafness and the fitful onsets of eczema which lamed him from 

 time to time. And at eighty-four he began to accuse himself 

 of loss of memory, more perceptible perhaps to himself than 

 to others, describing thus, for instance, inability to call up 

 the details of once familiar research and botanical study, 

 or, in other fields, to keep clearly apart the distinctions of the 

 different forms of Buddhism. 



As an octogenarian, in 1900 influenza robbed him to a 



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