56 ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW 
Sir Joseph Hooker resigned the directorship of Kew in November 
1885. He had been director for twenty years, after serving as assist- 
ant director for ten, and before that had been more 
HookTr° Un ^ er ° r ^ GSS officiaU y connected with the establishment 
since 1847, when he started on his famous Himalayan 
travels on its behalf. To few men of science has been accorded a 
life so long or so full of interest and usefulness. And, happily, the 
whole story of his life cannot yet be told, for he still lives and works 
at his home in Berkshire. He was born at Halesworth in Suffolk, J une 
30th, 1817. Early associations naturally turned his interests towards 
botany. He afterwards studied medicine, and when but twenty- 
two years of age he was appointed assistant surgeon and naturalist 
to the great Antarctic expedition under Sir James Ross (1839-43) — 
the most perilous, perhaps, that ever sailed from British shores. That 
is nearly seventy years ago ! From 1847 to 1851 he travelled in 
India, with results that have already been alluded to. In 1871 he 
visited Morocco and the Greater Atlas Mountains, and in 1877 
travelled over some of the most interesting regions of Western North 
America. The advantages to science, and more especially to botany 
and to Kew, derived from these travels have been very great. 
He was long the friend of Charles Darwin, who made him his 
first confidant in regard to the theories afterwards enunciated in the 
epoch-making “ Origin of Species.” To tell of all the honours and 
recognitions showered on Sir J oseph during his illustrious career would 
be too long a story for these pages. He received the K.C.S.I. from 
Queen Victoria in 1877, and was made G.C.S.I. in 1897. The German 
Emperor appointed him a knight of the Order Pour le Merite in 1902, 
and on his ninetieth birthday Edward VII. conferred on him the 
Order of Merit. But in one sense greater honours than any of these 
to Kew (for the establishment has always claimed to share in his 
honours) were his presidency of the British Association at Norwich, 
in 1868, and his presidency of the Royal Society from 1872 to 1877. 
In 1907, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Linnaeus, the Swedish 
Academy of Sciences awarded him the one specially-struck Linnaean 
Medal as “ the most illustrious living exponent of botanical science.” 
