XXX Proceedings. {March 2gth, i8g8. 



of the Sikkim Himalaya, likewise the first volume (all published) 

 of a Flora of India. This was never finished in its present form, 

 but his magnum opus, completed late last year in seven volumes, 

 on the Flora of India, will remain for all time a memorial of its 

 author. He might exclaim with Horace : ' Exegi monumentum 

 aere perennius.' The twentieth century is hardly likely to improve 

 upon the nineteenth in respect of Systematic Botany, and I think 

 Sir Joseph is happy in having lived during a period in which such 

 wonderful investigations and discoveries were possible. I would 

 also like to mention the Index Kewensis, completed during the 

 last decade of this century, a catalogue, arranged alphabetically, 

 of all known phanerogamic plants, the idea of which, inaugurated 

 by Charles Darwin, had, at his expense, been so well carried 

 out by Mr. Daydon Jackson, under the auspices of Sir Joseph 

 Hooker." 



Sir Joseph Hooker, in replying, said the great honour which 

 the Society had conferred upon him by the award of the Wilde 

 Medal was rendered doubly grateful by the fact that Manchester 

 held a place amongst his very earliest botanical reminiscences. 

 He was born a muscologist, and very early — in the first decade 

 of the eighty years that had passed over him — he was a collector 

 of mosses. He was stimulated in the pursuit by a book in his 

 father's library bearing the title of "Musci Britannici," by Edward 

 Hobson, of Manchester. Later on, when still in his teens, he 

 aided a young Glasgow botanist in collecting specimens for a 

 work he had in preparation on the lines of Hobson's. Man- 

 chester, indeed, was famous as a school of muscologists in the 

 first half of the century, and he need not recall to their memory 

 the names of John Nowell and Richard Buxton as forming, with 

 Hobson, a celebrated trio, distinguished for their critical know- 

 ledge of British mosses. A well-remembered Manchester friend 

 of his early youth was Thomas Glover, of Smedley Hill, an 

 excellent botanist and entomologist. Mr, Glover invited him to 

 Smedley Hill to see his beautiful collection of insects and rare 

 garden plants, and, though this was 65 years ago, he noticed that 

 the latter suffered a good deal from the city smoke. His 



