WOEK OF THE ELDEE HOOKEE 15 
plants of Parry's and Sabine's ^ Arctic voyages and on the 
botany of Beechey's voyage to Behring Strait, the Pacific, 
and China, compare with his son's Antarctic and Austrahan 
work. His ' Flora Boreali- Americana,' his ' British Flora,' his 
'Niger Flora ' are paralleled by work in the same fields. His ten 
books on ferns — for he was the leading pteridologist of his 
time — prelude Joseph Hooker's interest in the cryptogams, 
while the great series of the ' Icones Plantarum,' begun in 
1837 to illustrate new and rare plants selected from the 
author's herbarium, which later became the nucleus of the 
great Kew Herbarium, was continued under his son and suc- 
cessor at Kew, thanks to the bequest left for this purpose 
by Bentham. 
For the most part this work of his was a labour of love, often 
involving financial responsibility as well. Generous to others, 
and enthusiastic for his work, he thought little of his own 
interests in comparison with the scientific privileges offered 
by the position at Kew. He drew upon his private means, not 
only for his books, but for the ceaseless succession of botanical 
magazines of which he undertook the editorship, in order to 
secure a channel for recording the immense variety of new 
facts that came before him as director of large and expanding 
botanical gardens, facts needing to be set on record, though 
too scattered and disconnected for publication in anything 
but a ' miscellany.' 
Joseph Hooker's mother, Maria Turner, brought another 
strongly marked strain of character and capacity into his 
1 Sir Edward Sabine, K.C.B. (1788-1883), saw active service in the American 
war of 1812, but after 1816 devoted nearly all his life to science, especially 
astronomy and terrestrial magnetism. For his researches on these subjects 
when in the Arctic with Ross and Parry he received the Copley medal in 1821, 
and subsequently extended his researches half across the world. He, assisted 
by Ross and others, made the first systematic magnetic survey of the British 
Isles, and, paying a visit to Berlin, prompted Humboldt to urge the establish- 
ment of magnetic observatories throughout the British Empire in connection 
with those already established elsewhere by other Governments, a proposal 
which led to Ross's Antarctic expedition. Sabine was President of the Royal 
Society from 1861-71 ; he had been general secretary of the British Associa- 
tion 1839-59, except in 1852, when he was President. His magnum opus, 
which included a complete statement C/f the magnetic survey of the globe, 
extended over thirty-six years from 1840, in his series of ' Contributions to 
Terrestrial Magnetism ' in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 
