SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER 37 



Every botanist must know the value of the service rendered to 

 the science by the more than twenty years of assiduous labour that 

 gave us the Genera Plantarum, though what the labour of determin- 

 ing by personal examination the position and limits of every genus 

 of flowering plants amounted to is not, perhaps, always realized. 

 George Bentham, seventeen years Hooker's senior, had already 

 written the Botany of H.M.S. * Suli^hur,' his great memoirs on the 

 LabiatcB and on the Indian Scrojphularinece, and his Handbook of 

 the British Flora. He had, as we have seen, completed the Flora 

 Nigritiana, on Hooker's going to India ; and he had just finished 

 the Flora of Hongkong, In the course of these works he had 

 been impressed, as also had Hooker, with the need of a revision 

 of the genera of Phanerogamia which should, with the authority 

 of a competent personal scrutiny, replace Endlicher's work. The 

 joint work being agreed upon, a plan for the division of the labour 

 was also arranged ; but Hooker's official duties prevented him 

 from doing as much as was originally intended. After the com- 

 pletion of the great task Bentham fortunately published a brief 

 but explicit statement of the share that each of them ultimately 

 had in its performance, which may be summed up as amounting 

 to about two-thirds to Bentham and the remainder to Hooker, 

 although there was complete accord and mutual responsibility 

 throughout. Bentham's regular daily attendance at the Kew 

 Herbarium, and the daily intercourse with Hooker, naturally 

 developed into a close personal friendship, Bentham, for instance, 

 having his own latch-key to Hooker's house. 



Bentham's Flora of Hongkong suggested to Sir William Hooker 

 the official preparation, at Government expense, of a uniform series 

 of colonial Floras, with English descriptions, modelled on this 

 work. Grisebach's West Indian Flora (1859-64) and Harvey and 

 Sonder's Flora Gapensis (1859-65) formed part of the proposed 

 series. Bentham undertook the Flora Australiensis, the seven 

 volumes of which he completed, with the help of the materials 

 collected by Baron Ferdinand von Miiller, between 1863 and 1878 ; 

 and Hooker, the Handbook of the Neio Zealand Flora, which he 

 published between 1864 and 1867. He had not himself collected 

 at all extensively in New Zealand, which is presumably the point 

 of Darwin's comment, " Oh, my heavens ! to get up at second- 

 hand a New Zealand Flora, that is work ! " " but the magnitude 

 of his contribution of original description to the work may be 

 gauged by Mr. Hemsley's calculation that sixteen endemic genera 

 and more than half the species described "have the affix Hook. /." 



On the death of his father, Hooker became, in 1865, Director, 

 and it was not till ten years later that the Assistant Directorship 

 was revived. Possibly the change in rank did not involve a very 

 great real increase in work ; but those who w^ere in a position to 

 observe the allotment of his time at a somewhat later period will 

 know that the merely routine duties of official correspondence and 

 interviews occupied almost the whole of the forenoon of every day 



* Life and Letters, ii. 84. 



