' A BOKN M.USCOLOGIST * 3 
ing helper, his keen critic, and ultimate convert in the light of 
his own work and the material he could so abundantly furnish. 
The story of Joseph Hooker's life-work is, in one aspect, 
the history of the share taken by botany in estabhshing the 
theory of evolution and the effect produced upon it by accept- 
ance of that theory. He began with unrivalled opportunities, 
and made unrivalled use of them. As a botanist, he was 
born in' the purple, for in the realm of botany his father. Sir 
William Hooker, was one of the chief princes, and he had at hand 
his father's splendid herbarium, and the botanic garden which he 
had made one of the scientific glories of Glasgow University. 
Joseph Hooker's earhest recollections are preserved in an 
autobiographical fragment, set down late in his hfe. Note- 
worthy among the events that emerge from childish forgetful- 
ness, hke hill-tops above a sea of mist, is the early love of nature 
and especially of plants, inborn in him and indeed inherited 
from both lines of his parentage. His father and his mother's 
father were both botanists, and singularly enough they both 
began their studies as such with the mosses, quite independently 
of one another ; so that, being confessedly ' a born Muscologist,' 
he playfully dubs himself * the puppet of Natural Selection.' ^ 
I was born [he writes] June 30, 1817, at Halesworth, 
Suffolk, being the second child and son of WiUiam Jackson 
Hooker and Maria, 7iee Turner, of Great Yarmouth. My 
brother was older than myself and my parents had sub- 
sequently three daughters. I was named Joseph after my 
Grandfather Hooker, and Dalton after my godfather, the 
Eev. James Dalton, M.A., F.L.S., Eector of Croft, York- 
shire, a student of carices and mosses and discoverer of 
Scheuchzeria in England. 
My memory reverts to a very early age — when only three 
years old to my father's house at Halesworth, and inci- 
dents connected therewith, amongst others the gardener, in 
mov/ing a damp meadow behind the house, shcing the frogs 
with his scythe, and my brother running along the top of 
the garden wall to my mother's alarm. He died in 1840. 
Curiously enough I have no recollection of a magnificent dog, 
J Anniversary dinner of the Royal Society, Nov. 30, 1887. 
