1913] BOWER—SIR JOSEPH HOOKER 389 
and their relations to those of other lands, he concludes decisively 
in favor of mutability and a doctrine of progression. 
How highly this essay was esteemed by his contemporaries is 
shown by the expressions of LYELL and of Darwin. The former 
writes ‘‘I have just finished the reading of your splendid essay on 
the origin of species, as illustrated by your wide botanical expe- 
rience, and think it goes far to raise the variety-making hypothesis 
to the rank of a theory, as accounting for the manner in which 
new species enter the world.””. DARwInN wrote ‘‘I have finished your 
essay. To my judgment it is by far the grandest and most interest- 
ing essay on subjects of the nature discussed I have ever read.” 
But besides its historical interest in relation to the species ques- 
tion, the essay contained what was, up to its time, the most scientific 
treatment of a large area from the point of view of the plant- 
geographer. He found that the antarctic, like the arctic flora, is 
very uniform round the globe. The same species in many cases 
occur on every island, though thousands of miles of ocean may 
intervene. Many of these species reappear on the mountains of 
Southern Chile, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. The 
southern temperate floras, on the other hand, of South America, 
South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, differ more among them- 
selves than do ‘the floras of Europe, Northern Asia, and North 
America. To explain these facts he suggested the probable former 
existence, during a warmer period than the present, of a center of 
creation of new species in the Southern Ocean, in the form of either 
a continent or an archipelago, from which the antarctic flora radi- 
ated. This hypothesis has since been held open to doubt. But the 
fact that it was suggested shows the broad view which he was pre- 
pared to take of the problem before him. His method was essen- 
tially that which is now styled “ecological.” Many hold this to be 
a new phase of botanical inquiry, introduced by Professor WARMING 
in 1895. No one will deny the value of the increased precision 
which he then brought into such studies. But in point of fact it 
was ecology on the grand scale that Sir JosepH HOOKER practiced in 
the Antarctic in 1840. Moreover, it was pursued, not in regions of 
old civilization, but in lands where nature held her sway untouched 
by the hand of man. 
This essay on the flora of the Antarctic was the prototype of 
