^ THE JOURNAL OP BOTANY 



The valuable contributions to fossil botany which marked 

 the earlier part of Sir Joseph's scientific career, the papers on 

 Lepidostrobus, Trigonocarpon, and plants alike of the Carboni- 

 ferous and the Eocene periods, are remembered by few, sound as 

 they were in observation and reasoning. Except in diagnostic 

 or purely systematic work, he is not thought of as an anatomist 

 or as a physiologist ; but the paper on the rostellum of Listera 

 ovata, those on Nepenthes, the Balanopliorece, and on WeUcitschia 

 were, by themselves, no mean achievement. 



In a vast series of official or semi-official volumes he described 

 an enormous number of new genera and species in many different 

 classes of plants, and he had a large share in what was probably, 

 with the exception of De Candolle's Prodrovius, the most im- 

 portant critical work in descriptive botany during the nineteenth 

 century. The familiar abbreviations, Hook. fil. and BentJi. & 

 Hook, fil., will remain affixed to a host of plant-names as long as 

 botanists retain this useful method of verifying their nomenclature. 

 Such work, though invaluable to botanists, is not, perhaps, the 

 highest department of the science ; and other botanists of the 

 past or present may have been capable of performing it as well, 

 or possibly better than he did. His diagnoses, if clear, are not 

 remarkably concise. It may, however, be readily maintained 

 that even this, great as it is in bulk, was not his most important 

 contribution to botanical science. 



He was not called upon to teach or to write much educational 

 matter, his Primer is not remarkable among books of its class, 

 nor was the mere popularizing of his science his metier. The Hima- 

 layan Journals is in fact his only work appealing to the general 

 reader. The novelty and interest of their subject-matter and the 

 simplicity of the narrative gave them considerable temporary 

 success, but not the lasting appeal of Darwin's Voyage in the 

 Beagle, their professed model. So, too, his various admirable 

 addresses, mostly delivered at the meetings of the British As- 

 sociation, such as those on Insular Floras, the Arctic Floras, and 

 Insectivorous Plants, though hailed with acclamation by his 

 brother botanists, attracted but scanty outside attention. Ke- 

 taining throughout life a Scottish intonation acquired in his 

 youth, and without the graces of the orator, although an excellent 

 chairman — as he was, for example, for many years to the Scientific 

 Committee of the Eoyal Horticultural Society — he could better 

 reach a truly appreciative audience with his pen. 



It is, we think, as a geographical botanist that Sir Joseph 

 Hooker was supreme. In this department of botany he evinces 

 the greatest originality, while at the same time eminently sus- 

 ceptible to the influence of the opinions of others, opinions which, 

 when once accepted, he championed with enthusiasm and supported 

 by the most forceful reasoning, and by the wealth of illustrative 

 fact which only he, perhaps, could wield. Lyell, Forbes, Darwin, 

 were in this — perhaps in the order in which they are here named 

 — the main influences to which he submitted. He was for many 

 years in constant correspondence with Sir Charles Lyell, their 



