SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER 35 



Flora Indica, of the joint paper with Binney on Trigonocarpon 

 in the Philosophical Transactions, of several palaeobotanical papers 

 in the Journal of the Geological Society, and of the Illustrations of 

 Himalayan Plants, the letterpress of which was his work ; but it 

 was in this year also that he communicated to the Linnean Society 

 his first paper on the Balanophoracece, and that he was appointed 

 Assistant Director at Kew. 



The extent of his achievements in systematic and geographical 

 botany is apt to cause Hooker's contributions to special anatomy 

 to be overlooked. As early as 1845 he had written an account of 

 the remarkable group Balanophoracece for Lindley's Vegetable 

 Kingdom, and a third paper on them appeared in the Linnean 

 Transactions for 1859 ; but the most important memoir upon them 

 is that published in vol. xxii. in 1856, which is illustrated by 

 sixteen fine coloured plates by Fitch. It is an able grappling with 

 a difficult problem. 



This is neither the occasion nor the pen for a history of the 

 Eoyal Gardens, Kew, and the scientific institutions connected with 

 them. We suspect that few persons who have not had personal 

 experience of the working of some very closely similar congeries 

 of institutions can form any adequate notion of the magnitude of 

 the task of their administration. Sir William Hooker having 

 reached the age of seventy, much of the burden devolved naturally 

 upon his Assistant Director ; and though, as we have said, the 

 son had not the task of initiation which had fallen to his father's 

 lot fifteen years before, the work of such a post necessarily expands 

 progressively. The Gardens were not yet provided with a suitable 

 series of houses, nor was the first museum-building designed for 

 that purpose — now divided between four buildings — completed, 

 when Sir Joseph Hooker became Assistant Director. The corre- 

 spondence was little more than that of an energetic private 

 botanist, whilst the herbarium was still the private property of 

 the Director ; and the relations between the Gardens and such 

 colonial institutions as then existed were of an informal or un- 

 defined character. A man of less bodily and mental vigour than 

 Hooker might well have allowed himself to be monopolized by his 

 administrative duties ; and, prodigious as his scientific output 

 continued to be, there is, as might be supposed, some decrease 

 due to the cares of office. 



The scheme of the Flora Indica was not yet abandoned, and 

 from 1857 to 1861 Hooker and Thomson published a series of 

 PrcBcursores ad Floram Indicam in the Journal of the Linnean 

 Society. It was in the Transactions of the same Society in 1859 

 that the paper on the pitchers of Nepenthes appeared, which was 

 to be followed, fourteen years later, by a description of the whole 

 genus in the Prodrojnus. 



On the memorable July 1st, 1858, Lyell and Hooker com- 

 municated to the Linnean Society the papers of Darwin and 

 Wallace, in which the hypothesis of Natural Selection was first 

 publicly propounded. Though often impetuous in speech and 

 action, Hooker was eminently cautious intellectually, and was not 



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