SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER 
F. O. BOWER ey 
[In a memorial oration delivered at the University of Glasgow, June 25, 
1912, Professor BOWER spoke of Sir JosepH D. Hooker as a traveler, a geog- 
rapher, a geologist, a morphologist, an administrator, a scientific systematist, 
and a philosophical biologist. There is danger that HooKer’s great contri- 
butions to taxonomy will overshadow, for the biologists of a later generation, 
his important relation to the development of evolutionary theory. With the 
permission of Professor Bower, therefore, that part of his oration dealing 
with Hooker as a philosophical botanist is here reproduced.—Ep1Tor.] 
I hope I have not wearied you with these brief sketches of four 
of the great systematic works of Sir JosepH Hooker. I have 
gone somewhat more into detail than is quite justified in a public 
speech. But this has been done with a definite end in view. It 
was to show you 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 generalize 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 
philosophical 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 whole-hearted adherent. 
But he was also DArwitn’s constant and welcome adviser and 
critic. Well indeed was it for the successful launch of evolutionary 
theory that old-fashioned systematists took it in hand. Both 
Darwin and Hooker had wide and detailed knowledge of species 
as the starting-point of their induction. 
Botanical Gazette, vol. 55] [384 
