240 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



received, and have been answered, nearly every one of them, by the 

 hands of the directors themselves. 



The history of science furnishes few instances like this of prolonged 

 devotion to a public enterprise so splendidly carried out as to become 

 a national honor and a benefaction to the scientific world. The de- 

 velopment of Kew is a noble work of art requiring genius, taste, 

 enthusiasm and perseverance, as well as knowledge. The world had 

 to be ransacked to accumulate his treasures, and those treasures are for 

 the most part living things. The Hookers, father and son, have not 

 only given a generation of incessant work to the organization of the 

 Kew Gardens, but they have done it at a constant and large self- 

 sacrifice. They contributed effort and money to the perfection of a 

 work which is an honor to the government, and one would think 

 that the least the government could do would be fairly to admit the 

 obligation. But, under the Gladstone administration, the ofiice of 

 Commissioner of Public Works was conferred upon a narrow-minded 

 blockhead named Ayrton, who looked upon science and its interests 

 with the prejudice and contempt characteristic of politicians. His 

 office placed him in charge of the Botanical Gardens as the superior to 

 whom its director was responsible, and he began a course of meddle- 

 some interference with the affairs of the establishment which was so 

 insulting to Dr. Hooker, and would have been so injurious to the place, 

 that the leading scientific men of England united in a protest to the 

 government. The paper, signed by Lyell, Paget, Huxley, Darwin, 

 and Tyndall, was drawn up by the latter gentleman, and presented 

 the government in such a disgraceful attitude before the world, that 

 Parliament took up the subject and put a check to the offensive treat- 

 ment of Dr. Hooker by the arrogant and supercilious minister of pub- 

 lic works. A man's work must be his monument, and Dr. Hooker 

 may be well content with that ; but, after what has taken place, the 

 Government of England owes it to its own dignity to recognize in 

 some fitting way the eminent services of the director of the Botanical 

 Gardens. 



Dr. Hooker stands high, not only as an indefatigable explorer, but 

 also as a philosophic botanist ; and he long since espoused the doc- 

 trine that the species of the world's present flora have been derived 

 by descent and divergent modifications from ancient vegetable forms. 

 He married a daughter of the Rev. J. S. Henslow, Professor of Botany 

 in the University of Cambridge ; and his wife is not only herself an 

 accomplished botanist, but she shares in her husband's labors, and has 

 recently translated a splendid work upon the subject from the French 

 language. 



