PREFACE 
There seems to be, if I may be allowed to say so, a touch of 
personal appropriateness in the fact that the writing of Sir 
Joseph Hooker's Life has fallen to the son of his close friend. 
The work has thus been doubly a labour of love and re- 
membrance, and by good fortune it traverses a biographical 
field some part of which has already been worked over by me. 
If, however, I cannot claim to be a professed student of botany, 
something of my defect has been remedied by the kindness 
of others. The proofs have been most carefully read through 
by Sir David Prain, the present Director of Kew, and Miss 
Matilda Smith, Kew's botanical artist, who moreover has 
verified many references at Kew and supplied material for 
biographical notes not easily accessible elsewhere. 
Sir Joseph Hooker, for all that he accused himself on 
occasion of being a bad correspondent, was in reality an 
indefatigable letter writer. Indeed, he declares somewhere 
that the busier he was, the longer and fuller his letters were 
likely to be — and he was always busy. Apart from a vast 
official correspondence and regular weekly letters to various 
members of his family, there are extant over 700 sheets copied 
from his letters to Charles Darwin, whose own share of the 
correspondence, typed out, fills more than 800 pages. No other 
single correspondence compares with this ; but it is easily 
balanced by the total of letters to the next half dozen or 
so among his multitudinous correspondents, to name only 
Bentham and Harvey, Anderson and La Touche, Mr. Duthie 
and my father. Add to this his journals of travel, his various 
books, his scientific essays — the first written at nineteen, the 
