570 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
ALFEED KOOKER. 
By the death of Mr. Alfred Booker, from Syrian fever, at Beyrout, 
on the 27th of May, 1875, the Institution has lost one of its most 
distinguished members, and Plymouth one of its leading citizens. 
Mr. Booker was a man who, possessing great natural abilities, 
cultivated them wisely and used them well, and whose fame and 
usefulness were not confined by any merely local limits. He was 
not a young man, having entered his sixty-second year; but his 
vigorous activity, and the buoyancy of his spirits, when in 1874 he 
left Plymouth with his wife and daughters to fulfil a long-cherished 
desire of visiting the Holy Land, promised many more years of 
activity in the public service. But it was not to be. He was 
stricken down while on his homeward journey; and instead of 
welcoming his return, his many friends had the mournful duty of 
following his remains to their last resting-place in the Plymouth 
Cemetery. 
"His life," as the leading organ of the Congregational denomi- 
nation, of which he was a distinguished ornament, said, "was the 
practical expression of the ideal life of a Christian layman. The 
son of an Independent minister at Tavistock, and the lineal de- 
scendant of one of the ejected ministers of 1662, religion and 
Nonconformity were with him traditional inheritances. But in 
that quiet country town, surrounded by the solemn grandeur of 
Dartmoor, he caught something more than a tradition of religious 
life. Nature endowed him richly with the instinct of veneration, 
and we can well understand how the peacefulness of the minister's 
home, and the awe-inspiring solitudes of those silent hills and far- 
reaching moors, trained and strengthened this faculty." 
Mr. Booker's family was of Dutch origin, and the immediate 
ancestor one of the followers of "William of Orange, who landed 
with him in Torbay in 1688, and settled in England. The name 
was formerly spelt Rucker. Mr. Booker himself, though in the 
truest sense of the word a self-educated man, had the advantage in 
his early years not only of the training of his father, but of the 
