322 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



tensive botanical tours through the wildest parts of Scotland, 

 the Hebrides, and the Orkneys, which his lithe and athletic 

 frame and great activity fitted him keenly to enjoy. Coming 

 up to London, he made the acquaintance of Sir Joseph Banks 

 and of the botanists he had drawn around him, Dryander, So- 

 lander, and Robert Brown. 



In 1809 he went to Iceland, to explore that then little- 

 known island. The exploration was most successful ; but the 

 ship in which he embarked, with all his collections, notes, and 

 drawings, was fired and destroyed, and everything was lost, 

 he himself narrowly escaping with his life. Hooker's earliest 

 work, the " Journal of a Tour in Iceland," in two octavo vol- 

 umes, published at Yarmouth in 1811, and republished at 

 London two years afterwards, gives an interesting account of 

 his explorations and adventures, along with the history of a 

 singular attempt at the time to revolutionize the island, — with 

 which the disaster to the vessel he returned in was in some way 

 connected, we forget how. Not disheartened by these losses, he 

 now turned from a polar to an equatorial region, and made 

 extensive preparations for going to Ceylon, with Sir Robert 

 Brownrigg, then appointed governor. But the disturbances 

 which broke out in that island, more serious than those which 

 attended the close of his Iceland tour, again frustrated his 

 endeavors. 



The strong disposition for travel and distant exploration, 

 frustrated in his own case, came to fruit abundantly in the 

 next generation, in the world-wide explorations of his son. 

 He himself made no more distant journey than to Switzer- 

 land, Italy, and France, in 1814, becoming personally ac- 

 quainted with the principal botanists of the day, and laying 

 the foundation of his wide correspondence and great botanical 

 collections. In 1815 he married the eldest daughter of the 

 late Dawson Turner, of Yarmouth, and established his resi- 

 dence at Halesworth, in Suffolk. The next year, in 1816, 

 besides publishing some of the Musci and Hepaticm of Hum- 

 boldt and Bonpland's collection, he brought to completion his 

 first great botanical work, " The British Jungermannise," with 

 colored figures of each species, and microscopical analyses, in 



