Sir Joseph Dal ton Hooker. 



XXXI 



His last literary effort was to fulfil a wish long entertained to write ' A 

 Sketch of the Life and Labours ' of his father, for whose memory he 

 always cherished a deep affection ('Ann. of Bot.,' 1902). He dwells on " the 

 solicitude with which he fostered my own aspirations to become a traveller 

 and a botanist.'' It is rare in personal history for the lives of father and 

 son to form a continuous whole. It was a relationship where, to use his own 

 words, " one soweth, another reapeth." 



Eobert Brown was no less distinguished as a morphologist than as a 

 systematise Hooker, who took his place in English science, might have 

 had equal fame in both had not his interest in classification and distribution 

 been dominant. But his early palseontological work, in which the problems 

 are purely morphological, proves that he had the root of the matter in him. 

 No one, in fact, can accomplish anything fundamental in classification who 

 has not the morphological instinct, and all through life the detailed study 

 of plants with aberrant and peculiar structure always attracted him. His 

 classical memoirs on Balanophorece (1856 and 1859), a group of parasitic 

 and consequently highly reduced flowering plants, almost simulating fungi, 

 raised a question as to the homology of the female flower, which he 

 thought could only be solved by the study of its development, but as to 

 which 25 years afterwards he was not disposed to alter his views. The knot 

 is now cut by regarding reduction as having been carried to a point where 

 all homology has disappeared. In 1S57 he discussed the anomalous floral 

 structure of Siphonodoa. In 1859 he took up the study of Xqxnthac-ye. a family 

 which he monographed for De Candolle's ' Prodromus ' in 1873. His theory 

 of the pitcher (which was reproduced in French) as the expansion of an 

 apical leaf-gland is, in different terms, that substantially accepted. In 1863 

 he produced his great paper on Welwitschia ('Linn. Trans.,' vol. 24) (repro- 

 duced in German and Portuguese), which alone would have made the fame of 

 most botanists. Asa Gray thought that it was " the most wonderful 

 discovery, in a botanical point of view," of the century, and that Hooker had 

 " enjoyed (and improved) an opportunity unequalled by any botanist since 

 that which placed Eafflesia in Mr. Brown's hands."' 



This extraordinary plant in its extravagant anomaly is unique amongst 

 ligneous plants. Its stem instead of growing vertically expands horizontally 

 like a huge fungus half buried in the sands of South Africa, on which it 

 throws out its single pair of strap-shaped leaves. These grow continuouslv 

 from the base, to die off at the apex ; Hooker not unnaturally regarded them 

 as permanent cotyledons. In 1880, when seedlings had been raised at Kew, 

 Bower found that this was not the case, and that the actual cotyledons were 

 extremely fugitive, while the permanent leaves were a second pair at right 

 angles to them. This, though important and accepted by Hooker (' Gen. PI..' 

 vol. 3, p. 1224), in no way diminished their anomalous character. It is 

 noteworthy that in after years Hooker had occasion to describe species of a 

 widely different South African genus, Streptocarpus, in which the single leaf 

 is actually an enormously developed cotyledon. 



