AS PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGIST 315 



about fifty names. The total figures out to about 375,000 

 specific names, all of which were critically considered by the 

 octogenarian editor ! Surely no greater technical benefit was 

 ever conferred upon a future generation by the veterans of 

 science than this Index. It smooths the way for every systematist 

 who comes after. It stands as a monument to an intimate 

 friendship. It bears witness to the munificence of Darwin, and 

 the ungrudging personal care of Hooker. 



But the author of great works such as these was still willing to 

 help those of less ambitious flights. I must not omit to mention 

 two books which, being more modest in their scope, have reached 

 the hands of many in this country. In 1870 Hooker produced 

 his Students' Flora of the British Islands, of which later editions 

 appeared in 1878 and 1884. It was published in order to 

 "supply students and field botanists with a fuller account of the 

 plants of the British Isles than the manuals hitherto in use aim 

 at giving." In 1887 he edited, after the death of its author, the 

 fifth edition of Bentham's Handbook of the British Flora. Both 

 of these still hold the field, though they require to be brought up 

 to date in point of classification and nomenclature. 



The object of these brief sketches of four of the great 

 systematic works of Sir Joseph Hooker has been to show how 

 fully he was imbued with the old systematic methods : how he 

 advanced, improved and extended them, and was in his time 

 their chief exponent. His father had held a similar position in 

 the generation before him. But the elder Hooker, true to his 

 generation, treated his species as fixed and immutable. He did 

 not generalise from them. His end was attained by their 

 accurate recognition, delineation, description, and classification. 

 The younger Hooker, while in this work he was not a whit 

 behind the best of his predecessors, saw further than they. He 

 was not satisfied with the mere record of species as they were. 

 He sought to penetrate the mystery of the origin of species. In 

 fact, he was not merely a Scientific Systematist in the older 

 sense. He was a P hilosopJiical Biologist in the new and nascent 

 sense of the middle period of the nineteenth century. He was 

 an almost life-long friend of Charles Darwin. He was the first 

 confidant of his species theory, and, excepting Wallace, its first 



