33 



SIK JOSEPH DALTON HOOKEE. 



(1817-1911.) 



By G. S. Boulgee, F.L.S. 

 (Concluded from p. 9.) 



A THIRD year in India was substituted for the visit to Borneo, 

 the Government making a grant of £400 a year towards the 

 expenses, which was afterwards extended for three years after 

 Hooker's return, to enable him to work up his collections. In 

 none of his subsequent work is the completeness of Hooker's 

 scientific equipment as a traveller so manifest as in the outcome 

 of his Indian journey. Not only did his botanical knowledge 

 enable him to take full advantage of his opportunities for observa- 

 tion in practically unexplored regions, whilst his literary gift 

 produced an eminently readable narrative and his artistic skill 

 furnished it with graphic illustrations ; but he constructed a valu- 

 able map of the country traversed, made detailed meteorological 

 and geological observations, besides many interesting ethnological 

 notes, and drew up a complete account of the physical geography 

 of Sikkim and Eastern Nipal. He was practically the first ex- 

 plorer of the Eastern Himalaya since Turner's embassy to Tibet 

 in 1789, and spent two years in Sikkim. Although he received 

 every assistance in their power from Mr. Brian Hodgson, who had 

 been for many years Kesident at the Court of Nipal, and from 

 Dr. Campbell, of the Darjeeling Sanatorium, the scientific work 

 of this expedition was most emphatically his own. It was in fact 

 the personal animosity of a faction of the Sikkim Court against 

 Dr. Campbell that led to the violent detention of Hooker and the 

 doctor at Chumanako in November and December, 1849, which 

 very nearly ended in one of those assassinations of travellers 

 which have so often resulted from the most trivial misunder- 

 standings in semi-savage countries. 



Eeturning to Darjeeling, Hooker spent 1850 in the Khasia 

 Mountains and Sylhet, botanizing with Dr. Thomas Thomson, who 

 had been a pupil of his father's at Glasgow. The result was a 

 joint collection of about eight thousand species, the duplicates of 

 which were afterwards distributed from Kew. They left India in 

 January, 1851, and for the next four years Hooker was mainly 

 engaged in working out the results of this journey in conjunction 

 with Thomson, and in completing those of the Antarctic voyage. 

 A paper on the temperature of the soil in Egypt appears in the 

 1848 Beijort of the British Association, Hooker's long connection 

 with that body dating from a striking account of the diatomaceous 

 vegetation of the Antarctic in the Beport of the year before. The 

 Bengal branch of the Royal Asiatic Society pubhshed his meteo- 

 rological work : his first contribution to the Journal of the Boyal 

 Geographical Society was a paper on the passes into Tibet, pub- 

 lished in 1851 ; whilst the Horticultural Society's Journal for the 

 following year contained two contributions by him — one on tlie 



JouENAii OP Botany. — Vol 50. [Feb. 1912.] d 



