SIR WILLIAM HOOKER 



1785 1865 



By F. O. bower 



Early pursuits appointed to Glasgow Garden administration teaching 

 methods appointed Director of Kew state of Botany vigorous 

 development of Kew serial publications floristic work descriptive 

 work on Ferns his record. 



"POETA nascitur non fit." A poet is born, not made. If 

 this be true of poets, much more is it true of botanists. The 

 man who takes up botany merely as a means of making a 

 livelihood, rarely possesses that true spirit of the naturalist 

 which is essential for the highest success in the Science. It is 

 the boys who are touched with the love of organic Nature from 

 their earliest years, who grub about hedgerows and woods, and 

 by a sort of second sight appear to know instinctively, as 

 personal friends, the things of the open country, who provide 

 the material from which our little band of workers may best be 

 recruited. 



Such a boy was Sir William Hooker, the subject of this 

 lecture. He was born in 1785, at Norwich. There is no 

 detailed history of his boyhood, but it is known that in his 

 school days he interested himself in entomology, in drawing, 

 and in reading books of natural history, a rather unusual thing 

 at the time of the Napoleonic wars ! In 1805, when he was at 

 the age of 20, he discovered a species new to Britain, in Bux- 

 baumia aphylla, and his correspondence about it with Dawson 

 Turner shows that he was already well versed not only in the 

 flowering plants, but also in the Mosses, Hepaticae, Lichens, 

 and fresh-water Algae of Norfolk, his native county. Three 

 years later Sir James Smith dedicated to him the new genus 



