W. J. Hooker, G. Bentham, J. D. Hooker 247 



Colonial Floras. But his great work was the " Genera 

 Plantarum," in the execution of which he was associated with 

 Sir Joseph D. Hooker. One must not forget to mention 

 his " Handbook of the British Flora," published in 1858. 

 He was a man endowed with a gift of accuracy, discrimina- 

 tion and precision, and with infinite powers for hard work. 

 He handled collections of plants from every quarter of the 

 globe, and, as one of the most distinguished contemporaries 

 remarked, he possessed " an insight, of so special a character 

 as to be genius, into the relative value of characters for 

 practical systematic work a sure grading of essentials and 

 non-essentials." 



Bentham was an untiring worker, and it was character- 

 istic of him that having finished, after a year's incessant 

 work for the " Genera Plantarum," whose publication 

 extended from 1862-1883, the Orchidacece on a certain 

 Saturday afternoon, he bade the attendant at the Herbarium 

 to bring down the material for commencing the much more 

 difficult group of the Grasses. It is impossible here to enu- 

 merate the numerous papers and memoirs which Bentham 

 published, and one can only sum him up by saying that he 

 was one of the greatest systematic botanists who ever lived; 

 his colleague, Hooker, said of him " There is scarcely a 

 Natural Order that he did not more or less remodel." 



A contemporary of Bentham and the younger son of Sir 

 W. J. Hooker was Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911). 

 The younger Hooker is another example so common in 

 British biological science of men who approach their subjects 

 through extensive travel. Inspired by his father he, as a 

 boy, took an intense interest in botanical research, but, 

 like all young men, he was eager to travel, to see the world. 

 He qualified as a Doctor of Medicine at Glasgow, and was 

 delighted when Sir James Clark Ross offered to take him 

 as assistant surgeon and analyst on his ship the Erebus to 

 the Antarctic. When the expedition returned in 1843, 

 Hooker devoted himself to publishing the botanical results 

 of the voyage. These filled six quarto volumes. 



At about this date the intercourse between Darwin and the 

 younger Hooker became closer, and there was a constant inter- 

 change of correspondence between the two contemporaries, 



