473 
of Edinburgh^ Session 1865 - 66 . 
Flora Scotica, which appeared in 1821 ; his Flora Exotica, in 
1823-27 ; his leones Filicum, in coDj’unction with Dr Greville ; 
and in 1839 the first edition of his British Flora, in the 12th edi- 
tion of which he was assisted by Professor Walker Arnott. 
In 1836 he received the honour of knighthood, and through the 
infiuence of Earl Eussell he was appointed, in 1841, Director of 
the Eoyal G-ardens at Kew, a situation which he held during the 
rest of his life. In this favoured position he improved the arrange- 
ments of the G-ardens, and prevailed upon G-overnment to build a 
noble palm-house and extensive conservatories, and he founded a 
library and botanical museum, in which his noble herbarium, the 
largest in Eritain, is deposited. 
The works of Sir William Hooker, comprising upwards of fifty 
volumes of descriptive botany, illustrated chiefly by drawings from 
his own exquisite pencil, are too numerous to be mentioned in 
detail in a brief notice of his life. 
Sir William was a Knight of the Hanoverian Order and a Che- 
valier of the Legion of Honour, and he received from Oxford the 
degree of D.C.L., and from G-lasgow that of LL.D. He was a 
Fellow of the Eoyal, Linnean, Antiquarian, and other English 
Societies, and a Corresponding Member of the Imperial Institute 
of France, and of all the principal Academies in Europe and 
America. 
He died at Kew on the 12th of August 1865, in the 80th year 
of his age, and is succeeded in the direction of the Eoyal G-ardens 
by his distinguished son. Dr Joseph Dalton Hooker. 
Our list of British Honorary Fellows has sustained an irreparable 
loss by the recent death of Sir William Eowan Hamilton, one of 
the greatest mathematicians that have ever lived. 
At an early age he displayed uncommon talents, especially in 
the study of languages. He is said to have acquired nearly a 
dozen different languages when only thirteen years old. In his 
fifteenth year he had already mastered all the branches of mathe- 
matics usually taught in a university ; and in his twenty-second 
year, while but an undergraduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was 
appointed Andrews’ Professor of Astronomy, and Astronomer- 
Eoyal for Ireland, as successor to Dr Brinkley, who had been one 
3q 
VOL. V. 
