SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER 39 



and that on Geographical Distribution at the Centenary meeting 

 at York in 1881, were occasions of this kind, and each of these 

 addresses may be said to have been in their various departments 

 important contributions to the argument for evolution. Ever 

 since their study of the Galapagos plants in the first days of their 

 friendship, the floras of oceanic islands had been a constant sub- 

 ject for discussion between Hooker and Darwin, so that it is 

 difficult to say to which of them the use of these plants as the 

 basis of arguments in the Origin of Sjjecies originally belonged ; 

 but, until supplemented by Mr. Hemsley's essay in the ' Challenger ' 

 Eeports, and by Wallace's Island Life, this address was the only 

 important compendium of our knowledge of the subject. A paper 

 on "The Struggle for Existence among Plants," in the Popidar 

 Science Bevieio for 1867, also undoubtedly did much to clinch the 

 Darwinian argument ; and Darwin emphatically testified his sense 

 of the value of Hooker's outspoken support at Norwich. 



From 1867 to 1889 Hooker edited the third series of the 

 Icones Plantarum, which his father had established, and most of 

 the analytical details in the drawings illustrating his own con- 

 tributions are from his own hand. These consist chiefly of 

 species from St. Helena in the eleventh volume of the series. 

 Another man might have made his oflicial duties an excuse for 

 abstention from original scientific work ; but Hooker's perfect 

 greed for work, and that of a laborious character, is seen not only in 

 the editing, at the express request of his dead friend, of Harvey's 

 Genera of South African Plants, but also in his performing the 

 same office for the fourth volume of Boott's Illustrations of the 

 Genus Car ex, in 1867. 



An even more laborious undertaking was The Students' Flora 

 of the British Islands, first issued in 1870. The Flora originally 

 published by Sir William Hooker in 1830, the sixth, seventh and 

 eighth editions of which were the joint work of Dr. G. A. W. 

 Arnott, had for many years been a popular guide to British field- 

 botanists. From its first publication in 1843 Babington's Manual 

 had given a new direction to the study of our wild plants ; whilst 

 Bentham said somewhat contemptuously of his own Handbook, 

 first issued in 1858, that he " wrote it for ladies." Babington's 

 method of treating almost all named forms of plants in only two 

 categories, i.e., as species or varieties, certainly failed to suggest 

 those gradations of relationship recognised by the theory of 

 descent ; whilst Bentham's method of ignoring the diflicult groups 

 was neither scientific nor educational. Hooker had not the 

 repute of having devoted much attention to British species in 

 the herbarium, still less in the field. He, however, drew up most 

 of the ordinal, generic, and specific characters " from living or 

 dried specimens or both," and then consulted English Botany 

 and other British and Continental Floras. From the systematic 

 point of view the most original feature of the work is the elaborate 

 gradation of tribes, sections, sub-species, varieties, and forms into 

 which he subdivides his orders, genera, and species, thus combining 

 most of the minute study of the " splitter " with the expression 



