SIR JOSEPH HOOKER.*
THE late Sir Joseph Hooker was a miracle of industry and achieve- ment. He lived to be ninety-four, and was busy with his pen in the year of his death. The catalogue of his works, taken from the Kew Bulletin, occupies more than twenty pages. The list of his degrees, appointments, societies, and honours contains over two hundred entries, and these two volumes run to eleven hundred pages. Within the limits of space at our disposal it is impossible to attempt more than a very brief sketch of his multifarious activities, his services to science, and his personality. The influence of heredity is remarkable. Hooker came of an old West Country family, and numbered amongst his forbears a great merchant adventurer—from whom one likes to trace his love of travel, of sea and snow—and the "Judicious Hooker," whom, though no friend of theologians, he at least resembled in his sagacity; while • Life and Letters of Sir Joetpli Datt,rn Hooker, 0.11., 0.0.8.1. • Based 05 materials Collected and Arranged by Lady Hooker. By Leonard Huxley. With rortmits slid Illustrations. 2 vols. London; John Murray. Pee. net., on the mother's side he inherited from the Cotmans a strong taste for art and considerable powers as a draughtaman. These he turned to admirable account, not only in his special study, but as a map-maker and surveyor. Indeed, his surveys in Sikkim have been of the utmost practical value to Staff officers and geographers down to the present day. As a botanist he was, as his biographer says, born in the purple ; his father, Sir William Hooker, whom he so long assisted and succeeded at Kew, being the first Professor of Botany at Glasgow, a great observer, illustrator, and collector. At Glasgow University, which he entered at fifteen, he studied Mathematics and Moral Philosophy, Greek and Latin, but took his degree in Medicine in 1839. His interest in Science was wide-ranging; he bettered the precept non multa sed mubutn, and combined the two ideals. In this appreciative versatility he was far ahead of his time ; he was the link between the old systematic and the new morphological botany ; he became the greatest exponent of geographical distribution and a protagonist of evolution. This only came gradually ; it was Hooker's privilege, as Mr. Leonard Huxley reminds us, "to be Darwin's ole confidant for nearly fifteen years, his generous friend, his unstinting helper, his keen critic, and ultimate convert in the light of his own work and the material he could so abundantly furnish." And his life- long friendship with Huxley, another and perhaps the greatest champion of evolution, was marked by a generosity and delicacy equal to that of Darwin, with whom he was bracketed by Tyndall as the "two modestest men in Science." Hooker is associated in the popular mind with the glories of Kew, but before settling down there as his father's assistant he had won his spurs as a scientific, traveller. He served as assistant surgeon and botanist in H.M.S. ' Erebus ' on Ross's famous Antarctic voyages, 1839-1843, in which he underwent many perils and hardships, embodying his researches in the six volumes of Flora Antarctica, Flora Novae- Zelandiae, and Flora Tasmaniae, besides contributing freely to Ross's official record. His Himalayan journeys, which exposed him to seven weeks' perilous captivity in Sikkim, and his journey to the Khasia Hills (1847-1850) bore fruit in his admirable Himalayan Journals (1854) and the great Flora Indica, begun with his colleague Thomas Thomson, but not completed till 1897. The Genera Plantarum, in which he collaborated with Bentham, occupied him from 1862 to 1883. In 1898-1900, at the age of eighty, he completed Trirnen's Flora of Ceylon, and in 1904 contributed a sketch of the Flora of British India to the Imperial Gazetteer. This record takes no account of endless reports on collections made by travellers and botanists in all parts of the world, obituary elogea, essays, and addresses, many of them of the utmost importance from their bearing on Darwin's theories. For Hooker was not only a great botanist but a great philosophical biologist. And there remains to be added the Hew Index, begun in 1882, which took almost ten years to complete. The expense of this work, carried out by Dr. Jackson under Hooker's personal supervision, was borne by Charles Darwin and by his family after his death. It is, as Professor Bower says, a monument to an intimate friendship, bearing witness to the munificence of Darwin and the ungrudging personal care of Hooker. As for Kew, where he succeeded his father in 1865, three generations of the Hooker dynasty—Sir William, Sir Joseph, and his son-in-law, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, made Kew what it is." Before 1840, when the Department of Woods and Forests took it over, it was an appanage of the Crown. Under the efficient and enlightened administration of the Hookers it became a "great scientific establishment, a great co-ordinating machine for systematic comparison, and, to the general public, a place of the purest delight." This conversion was no easy matter to effect in the face of State or Departmental parsimony, or, as in the Ayrton episode, aggressive and unsympathetic intervention. Father and son were alike indefatigable workers. Sir Joseph's services in reorganizing the Linnean Society, the first Society he joined, were recognized by a special gold medal struck in 1898. The changes effected by him in the Royal Society when he was President, especially in regard to fees and the Publication Fund, were hardly less notable or enlightened. Yet he never allowed himself to be "snowed under" by his official duties, but found time for everything, and throve upon overwork. He was a great administrator as well as a great man of science. And in the domain of economic botany he was a far-sighted promoter of our Imperial interests. He was a prime mover in the introduction of cinchona into India, Jamaica, and the Cape ; he was the dewy ex machina through whom the manufacture of tobacco into good cigars was introduced into Jamaica ; and by transporting the rubber plant from the Amazon and the Orinoco to our own healthier Colonies he was the initiator and founder of a great industry, the future of which he clearly foresaw as far back as 1875.
Hooker shone in all domestic relations as son, husband, and father. His devotion to his own father, to whom he owed so much, dominated his youth and controlled his ambitions for half his life. He was too busy a man to have many intimates, but within limits he had a genius for friendship. Tested by the maxim /14ficitur a sociis, he was indeed to be envied, and the letters that passed between him and Darwin and Huxley reveal an affection and a chivalrous oomradeship beyond praise. Family losses and the death of his friends affected him deeply, just as, on the other hand, he rejoiced in the triumphs and successes of those who were near and - dear to him. He was lovable in his own household, tolerant and wise in counsel. Mr. Leonard Huxley notes that "years of service in one of His Majesty's ships gave Hooker, as it gave both Darwin and Huxley, an invaluable acquaintance with the realities of things, and there was 'a masonic bond' between these friends 'in being well salted in early life.'" He had the art of handling men ; as a traveller he often showed more capacity and tact than his official chiefs and leaders ; and though generally outspoken and downright, could be "beautifully diplomatic." Thus when endeavouring to secure a pension for Fitch, the botanical draughtsman, he successfully played on Disraeli's Imperialist feelings by showing him. Fitch's drawings of the Victoria Regis. He loved young people, and kept his boyish- ness into extreme old age. Though he drifted far from the religious environment of his youth, holding with Spencer that the ultimate power of the universe was inscrutable, his attitude might be summed up as one of reverent agnosticism. When he was President of the British Association in 1868 he wrote from Norwich to Darwin : "The Cathedral service was glorious, the Anthem was chosen for me, 'What though I know each herb and flower,' and brought tears to my eyes, and Dr. Megee's discourse was the grandest ever heard by Tyndall, Berkeley, Spottiswoode, Hirst, and myself." He was devoted to musio, and had heard with delight Malibran as a boy (not in 1837, as given in the text, for she died in 1836). Then he was an enthusiastic admirer and collector of Wedgwood ware, and In his old age made all his wedding presents in Wedgwood plaques. His taste in reading was omnivorous, ranging from Mrs. Markham (read with his younger sons) to Mrs. Humphry Ward; from Clariesa Harlowe to Lafcadio Hearn. In regard to education, he was critical of the old classical curriculum but recognized its value, taught his sons colloquial Latin, and, as a disciple of Linnaeus, staunchly upheld Latin botanic nomenclature. He did not oppose the education of the working classes, but wished to see it "conducted towards the future life of the average, and not to the high education of the few." He bitterly regretted Sir John Lubbock's entrance into politics; practical politics were in his view irreconcilable with the pur- suit of science. He deplored the neglect of science displayed by the official or governing classes ; and in his own official relations had suffered more from the activity of the Liberals than the passivity of the Tories, though neither offered special sympathy. He was no flatterer of democracy ; "a democracy," he wrote in 1891, "sounds very well for a uniformly educated people, but when the masses are not only ignorant but wrong-headed, it would only be a curse to all." And yet two years later he was "dreamer enough to look for a time when America will forbid a European war." As long ago as 1890 he thought the whole of Prussia breathed arrogance.
Hooker was, in fine, a Ulysses and Nestor among botanists, and Mr. Leonard Huxley, bringing enthusiasm and family affection to his task, has given us an abiding memorial of one of the greatest of the scientific heroes of the nineteenth century.
Previous page
