Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. 



xx in 



Beturning to more personal events, Hooker gave in 1866 the lecture on 

 " Insular Floras " at Nottingham, which has already been discussed. In the 

 following year he made a brief excursion to Brittany with Huxley and 

 Lord Avebury to examine pre-historic remains. Nothing refreshed him so 

 much as a holiday of this sort with some scientific interest in view. In 1870 

 he went with Huxley to the Eifel ; Tyndall would have been of the party, 

 but was detained by his lectures. In 1873 he took Huxley, who had been 

 seriously ill, to Auvergne. They visited the four volcanic areas explored by 

 Scrope, and roughed it with all the hardihood of experienced travellers. 

 Huxley was none the worse for sleeping on one occasion on two planks 

 in a cupboard (H.L.L., vol. 1, p. 392). The friends thought that they had 

 made a great discovery in the evidence of glacial action. Hooker published 

 an account in 'Nature,' but found that he had been anticipated by 

 Sir William Guise in 1870. In 1867, besides working out Bosacece for 

 Martius' ' Elora Brasiliensis,' he edited a posthumous volume of his friend 

 Boott's ' Illustrations of the Genus Carex' 



In 1868 Hooker was President of the British Association at Norwich. 

 Darwin wrote that the address was received by the Press with " a chorus of 

 praise," and that he himself thought it " most striking and excellent " 

 (L.L., vol. 3, pp. 100-1). Hooker had, needlessly in the event, urged in 

 extenuation of any shortcomings, want of leisure in the discharge of " duties 

 as administrator of a large public department, entailing a ceaseless corre- 

 spondence with the Government offices, and with botanical establishments all 

 over the globe." He managed to touch on a wide range of important 

 scientific questions. He lamented the failure of museum management to 

 grasp its educational possibilities — and he might lament still. He reiterated 

 the opinion, " shared by an overwhelming majority of British naturalists," 

 that the National Collection of Natural History should be under the control 

 of a scientific head, and this has come about. He dwelt with satisfaction on 

 the fact that the ten years that had elapsed since the appearance of the 

 ' Origin ' found Natural Selection " an accepted doctrine with almost every 

 philosophical naturalist." He thought Darwin's "new hypothesis of 

 Pangenesis . . . may prove to contain the rationale of all the phenomena of 

 reproduction and inheritance." The prevision was more correct than he 

 really suspected to be probable ; for as recently as 1909 Strasburger could 

 say, " Charles Darwin's idea that invisible gemmules are the carriers of 

 hereditary characters, and that they multiply by division, has been removed 

 from the position of a provisional hypothesis to that of a well founded 

 theory. It is supported by histology, and the results of experimental work 

 in heredity, which are now assuming extraordinary prominence, are in close 

 agreement with it " (' Darwin and Modern Science,' p. iii). Hooker thought 

 that there were some who " will prefer embodying the idea in such a term 

 as potentiality, a term which conveys no definite impression whatever, and 

 they will like it none the less on this account." He was really quietly 

 laughing at himself, for this is precisely what he and Huxley had propounded 



