36 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



as easy to convert as his junior, Huxley ; but in November, 1859, 

 the magnificent Introductory Essay to the Flora Tasmanice, defi- 

 nitely announced his belief in the mutability of species, the first 

 fifth of that work being devoted to the species question, the 

 remainder to the geographical problems as to the origin and 

 migration of the Australian flora. This confession of faith was, 

 of course, at once welcomed as a great accession of strength by 

 the Darwinians, although, perhaps, the general public were hardly 

 aware of Hooker's adhesion to the new school of thought until 

 the delivery of his Presidential Address to the British Association 

 at Norwich in 1868. 



The six fine volumes of the Botany of the Antarctic being com- 

 pleted. Hooker, in 1860, accompanied Captain Washington, Hydro- 

 grapher to the Eoyal Navy, and Mr. Daniel Hanbury on a brief 

 holiday visit to Syria, with the special object of examining the Cedars 

 of Lebanon in their native habitat. This trip resulted in papers 

 on the Cedars and on the Oaks of Palestine, published in 1862, 

 and in Hooker's contributing an article on the Botany of Syria to 

 Smith's Dictionary of the Bible in 1863, an article which is, 

 perhaps, somewhat disappointing since the identification of the 

 plants mentioned in the Bible is not attempted. 



Meantime, the discovery made by Welwitsch in the desert of 

 Angola was to associate Hooker with the third botanical marvel 

 of the nineteenth century, as Brown had been associated with 

 Bafflesia and Lindley with Victoria regia. The remarkable 

 survival of an early gymnospermous type which its discoverer 

 named Tumhoa, but which is better known by Hooker's name, 

 Weliuitschia, gave rise to several preliminary notices from his pen, 

 culminating in the paper published in the Linnean Transactions 

 for 1863, with fourteen plates, a paper which for thoroughness of 

 anatomical analysis ranks with those on Myzodendron, the 

 Balanophoracece, and Nepenthes. 



The wide sweep of Hooker's studies in phytogeography is well 

 exemplified by the year 1862, which saw not only the publication 

 of the already mentioned papers on Palestine trees, but also of 

 his important Outline of the Distrihiition of Arctic Plants, read in 

 1860, in the Transactions, and of the equally important paper on 

 Gustav Mann's collection of plants from the upper half of Clarence 

 Peak, Fernando Po, read in 1861, in the Journal, of the Linnean 

 Society ; and, moreover, the beginning of the Genera Plantarimi. 

 The memoir on the Arctic flora is important not merely as *' the 

 first general tabulation of the plants found growing within the 

 Arctic Circle," but more particularly for the way in which this 

 " Scandinavian " flora is traced into all latitudes and its spread 

 is accounted for. So too the value of the Clarence Peak paper in 

 phytogeography is its demonstration of the close affinity between 

 this West African mountain flora and that of the highlands of 

 Abyssinia, the first indication of that unexpected community in 

 character of the plants of Eastern and Western Tropical Africa 

 which has so important a bearing on the question of plant- 

 migration from south to north. 



