A. C. Seward. 
198 
was dedicated to Darwin “ by bis affectionate friend J. D. Hooker.” 
In a long letter to Hooker, when he was in India, Darwin wrote in 
1848, “Your letter was the very one to charm me, with all its 
facts for my species’ book, and truly obliged I am for so kind a 
remembrance of me . . . well thank heavens, when you do come 
back you will be nolens volens a fixture.” 1 Hooker writing to Darwin 
in 1854 tells him that his intention in regard to the dedication 
“ was formed during the Antarctic voyaye, out of love for your own 
Journal . . . Short of the gratification I felt in getting the book 
I know no greater than your kind, hearty acceptation of the dedica¬ 
tion ; and had the reviewers gibbeted me, the dedication would 
alone have given me real pain.” 2 
In 1855 Hooker was appointed Assistant Director of the Royal 
Gardens, Kew, during the Directorship of his father Sir William 
Hooker, whom he succeeded as Director in 1865. In 1860 he 
visited Syria; in 1871, in company with John Ball, he travelled in 
the Atlas mountains, and in 1877 made botanical explorations in 
the United States with Asa Gray. 
The early history of the friendship of Hooker and Darwin has 
recently been retold by Professor Judd in his singularly attractive 
book “The Coming of Evolution.” 3 He reminds us that when 
Darwin was writing his Journal of Researches he handed the proof- 
sheets to Lyell who showed them to his father. The elder Lyell 
passed them on to young Mr. Hooker, then in the middle of his 
preparations both for an Antarctic voyage and the M.D. degree. 
“ So pressed for time was I,” Hooker wrote in some notes supplied 
to Mr. Francis Darwin when he was engaged in writing his father’s 
life, “that I used to sleep with the sheets of the ‘Journal’ under 
my pillow that 1 might read them between waking and rising. They 
impressed me profoundly, I might say despairingly, with the variety 
of acquirements, mental and physical, required in a naturalist who 
should follow in Darwin’s footsteps, whilst they stimulated me to 
enthusiasm in the desire to travel and observe.” 4 “ It has been,” 
Sir Joseph continued, “a permanent source of happiness to me 
that I knew so much of Mr. Darwin’s scientific work so many years 
before that intimacy began which ripened into feelings as near to 
1 More Letters, Vol. I, p. 63. 
2 M. L., Vol. I, p. 70. 
3 The Coming of Evolution (Cambridge, 1910), p. 126. 
Life and Letters, Vol. I., p. 20. 
4 
