296 N'otes and Comments. 



SIR JOSEPH HOOKER 



At the Conference of Delegates, the Chairman, Professor 

 F. O. Bower, F. R.S. dealt with the life and work of Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, whose death, in December, 1911, may be held to have 

 been one of the most outstanding events of the year. He did 

 not give any consecutive biographical sketch of this great 

 botanist, but indicated the various lines of activity in which 

 he excelled. He contemplated him as a traveller and geo- 

 grapher, as a geologist, as a morphologist, as an administrator, 

 as a scientific systamatist, and, above all, as a philosophical 

 biologist. As a traveller Sir Joseph visited all the great 

 circumpolar areas of the Southern hemisphere. He spent 

 almost four years in India. He botanised in Palestine and in 

 Morocco, and finally in the Western States of America. The 

 results he worked up into such a great fioristic publications as 

 the Antarctic flora and the flora of British India. As an ad- 

 ministrator he guided for thirty years the destinies of Kew, 

 and served for five years as President of the Royal Society. 

 As a scientific systematist he co-operated in the Genexa 

 Plantarum and the Kew Index. 



A PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGIST. 



But it was perhaps, as a philosophical biologist that he 

 rose to the gi'eatest heights. An early friend of Darwin, he 

 was the first to accept his views. In 1859 Darwin himself 

 wrote : ' As yet I know only one believer, but I look at 

 him as of the greatest authority — viz.. Hooker.' While 

 Lyell wavered, and Huxley had not yet comein, Hooker 

 was in 1859 ^ complete adherent to the doctrine of the 

 mutability of species. But this position was confirmed by 

 a masterly series of essays from his own pen. The most 

 notable address was the introduction to the flora of Tasmania. 

 The last was that notable address to the Geographical Section 

 of the British Association at York in 1881 on ' The Geographical 

 Distribution of Organic Beings.' It was such works as these 

 which led to the cumulative result that he was universally 

 held to have been the most distinguished botanist of his time.. 



ADDRESS TO THE BOTANICAL SECTION. 



Professor Keeble gave some useful hints to the botanists 

 in his address at Dundee. The recent death of Sir Joseph 

 Hooker served as a pretext for comparing present day biologists 

 with the more versatile workers of the Victorian age. The- 

 present generation, he said, has become expert in intensive 

 cultivation of scientific knowledge, but it has forgotten how 

 to market its produce. In the pre-occupation of specialisa- 

 tion it neglects the art of expression. It sinks the artist in the 



Naturalist, 



