ii Obituary Notice of Fellow deceased. 



Without capacity for business he was induced to join Mr. Paget (father of 

 Sir James and Sir George) in a brewery at Halesworth. The venture was 

 unsuccessful; he had sold his property and other "investments were 

 disappointing " ; with a wife and four children he found himself crippled by 

 a lavish expenditure on his scientific publications and indulgence in a costly 

 library. He was therefore glad to accept, through the influence of Sir 

 Joseph Banks, the Begius Chair of Botany at Glasgow which had been 

 declined by Kobert Brown. 



At Glasgow, Joseph Hooker received at the High School the old-fashioned 

 Scotch liberal education ; it enabled him throughout life to write Latin with 

 facility. In the University he took the M.D. in 1839, and could recall sitting 

 on the same bench in the old building, now abandoned to a railway company, 

 with Lord Kelvin and Lord Sandford when the father of the latter was 

 Professor of Greek. Some of its teaching left little permanent impression. 

 Thirty years later he said in his Presidential Address at Norwich : " Having 

 been myself a student of Moral Philosophy in a Northern University, I 

 entered on my scientific career full of hopes that Metaphysics would prove a 

 useful mentor, if not a guide in science. I soon, however, found that it 

 availed me nothing." 



Hooker, residing under his father's roof, had imbibed from his stimulating 

 intercourse and teaching a passion for botanical research and a keen desire 

 for travel and exploration as a means of extending it. This was gratified 

 when, immediately on taking his degree, he was appointed at the age of 21 to 

 accompany " officially as assistant-surgeon, but in reality as naturalist, the 

 famous expedition of Sir James Clark Eoss, fitted out by the Government for 

 the purpose of investigating the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism in the 

 south circumpolar seas." His first actual contribution to scientific literature 

 was a description in 1837 of three new Indian mosses published in his 

 father's " Icones Plantarum." It has been remarked that it is " a curious 

 coincidence " that Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley each " began his scientific 

 career on board one of Her Majesty's ships " (H.L.L., vol. 1, p. 29). It is 

 more than curious when one reflects on the influence on scientific thought 

 which the three men in association were afterwards to effect. 



The story of the Darwinian theory unfolds itself like a drama. And there 

 is something fateful in the way in which the three chief protagonists, to 

 whom Sir Charles Lyell must be added, were drawn into its action. In 1839 

 Darwin published his 'Journal of Eesearches.' At the Geological Society, 

 where he had " acted as one of the honorary secretaries," he had made 

 Lyell's acquaintance and gave him proof-sheets. These Lyell passed on to 

 his father, Charles Lyell of Kinnordy, a warm friend of the elder Hooker. It 

 i6 hardly too much to say that this accidental circumstance effected a 

 filiation of the work of Hooker's life to that of Darwin. Hooker tells us 

 (L.L., vol. 2, pp. 19, 20) that the elder Lyell, " taking a kind interest in my 

 projected career as a naturalist, had allowed me to peruse" the proof-sheets. 

 He continues : " At this time I was hurrying on my studies, so as to take my 



