xxxii Sir William Jackson Hooker. 
the progress of the science which both worshipped with 
single-minded zeal, that Lindley and my father were regarded 
as meriting equal recognition as scientific botanists and inde- 
fatigable labourers throughout forty-five years of their active 
lives, and that they should have been fast friends till death, 
within three months of one another 1 . 
As his own reputation advanced so did that of his 
herbarium and library, which before he had been ten years 
in Glasgow were reckoned as amongst the richest private ones 
in Europe 2 . This was due to his active correspondence, 
1 The following admirable summary of the life-works of my father and Lindley 
respectively, is extracted from the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences, May 29, 1866 : — ‘ The names of Hooker and Lindley, which stood side 
by side in our botanical section, are naturally associated as those of the two most 
eminent botanists in Great Britain — also by the parallel course, and near coincidence 
in the close of their lives. Born in the same neighbourhood, in youth receiving 
their education at the same school, and early drawn together by similar predilections, 
they both devoted themselves with singular energy and perseverance to their 
chosen pursuit ; exerted for many years, although in somewhat different ways, 
a paramount influence upon the advancement of botanical science ; and died near 
together in place and time — the elder at Kew, on August 13 last, at the age of 
eighty years ; the younger at Turnham Green, on the first of the ensuing November, 
at the age of sixty-seven years. For a long time they were the two most dis- 
tinguished teachers in Great Britain, one at a northern, the other at the metro- 
politan University. They severally conducted two of the principal serial works 
by which botany contributes to floriculture ; and they developed into highest 
usefulness the two great establishments, the Royal Gardens at Kew, and the 
Horticultural Society of London. Both wrote and published largely — Hooker only 
upon descriptive botany, in which he greatly excelled, while Lindley traversed 
a wider field, and grappled with abstruser problems in every department of the 
science, always with confidence and facility, but not with unvarying success.’ 
2 The following testimony to the value of the herbarium is an extract from an 
essay on European Herbaria by Asa Gray, written in 1841, and published in the 
American Journal of Science and Arts, xl. 1 (see also Scientific Papers of Asa 
Gray/ ii. 13) : ‘The herbarium of Sir William J. Hooker, at Glasgow, is not 
only the largest and most valuable collection in the world, in possession of a 
private individual, but it also comprises the richest collection of North American 
plants in Europe. Here we find nearly complete sets of plants collected in the Arctic 
voyages of discovery, the overland journeys of Franklin to the polar sea, the 
collections of Drummond and Douglas in the Rocky Mountains, Oregon, and 
California, as well as those of Professor Scouler, Mr. Tolmie, Dr. Gairdner, and 
numerous other officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, from almost every part of 
the vast territory embraced in their operations from one side of the continent to the 
other. By an active and prolonged correspondence with nearly all the botanists 
and lovers of plants in the United States and Canada, as well as by the collections 
