the few intelligent officials with whom he had to deal, who sympathised with and helped him.

Here we may read the full story of the ignorant insolence of one Ayrton-an obscure politician who became a minister of the Crown, and proposed to make Kew into a mere pleasure-garden and to give his orders to Hooker as to a head-gardener, but was, by a timely rally of wiser statesmen and lovers of science, brought to heel like a whipped dog. Here too we read of the mean financial tricks of the East India Company, the delays of the Admiralty, the stupid parsimony of the Treasury relieved by the generosity and friendship of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, the goodwill of fine old Admirals and the enthusiasm of many high-placed officials (such as Bertram Mitford, Lord Redesdale) and well-tried friends who valued pure science and were spell-bound by Hooker's abilities, persistence, freedom from all desire for personal profit, and simpleminded devotion to one noble end-the building up of what were for him two inseparables, Kew and Botanical Science.

Hooker's more direct contributions to scientific botany are parallel in importance to the creation of the great institution (founded by his father and completed by the loyal help of his son-in-law and successor), wherein he worked out during many years the enormous collections of plants brought thither by himself, and amplified by official and private collections. His first scientific paper, on some new mosses, was written and published in 1837, when he was only twenty years of age; his last in 1911, on some Indian species of the Balsams (genus: Impatiens)— a large and difficult group to which he gave minute study, dissecting them under the microscope and drawing them with all the skill and assiduity of his youth, until within a few days of his death in his ninety-fifth year. The mere titles of the papers and volumes which Hooker produced in those seventy-four years of work occupy twenty pages in the 'Life.' No mere enumeration of their number can give an idea of their bulk, of the number of drawings and often coloured pictures which illustrate them, of the tireless industry which produced them, or of their scientific weight and purpose.

For the convenience of ready publication, he carried

out, as these volumes of his Life and Letters' enable us to do, to what native gifts of mind and character, on the one hand, and to what fortunate circumstances of training and association on the other, this contribution was due. Those are the enquiries which must always be of foremost interest when we are in possession of the detailed story of a great man's life.

Hooker was before and beyond everything else a great botanist, the greatest 'knower' of plants of his day, whether we estimate the immense number and variety of plants which he knew, or the thoroughness of that knowledge, or the vast area-that of the whole earth's surface-the vegetable population of which became familiar to him, either in the dried collections of travellers or (to an extent never achieved by any earlier or cotemporary botanist) in their living condition. The latter result was attained in two distinct ways: firstly by his prolonged and often perilous journeys to the southern hemisphere, to India and the Himalayan region, to Palestine and the Lebanon, to the Atlas mountains and to North America; and secondly by his control of the most extensive and admirably organised botanic garden in the world, where living plants were almost daily received or were raised from seed sent from every part of the earth's surface.

Probably the greatest permanent benefit conferred on mankind by Hooker-his greatest contribution to science-was his organisation, as a great and permanent State-institution, of the gardens, plantations, glasshouses, museums, laboratories and the incomparable herbarium, at Kew, together with its highly trained staff of all grades, its splendid and continuous series of publications, its world-wide correspondence and close relations with botanical institutions in the colonies and India, so as to form a vast living mechanism, working under his incessant care for the increase of botanical science. The indifference, the opposition, the sheer brutality, by which his efforts were too frequently opposed, and the ultimate triumph by which his tenacity of purpose, his honesty and unworldliness of character, were rewarded, can be realised and appreciated by the reader of this book. So also can one learn with pleasure of the fine men, both among his scientific colleagues and

the few intelligent officials with whom he had to deal, who sympathised with and helped him.

Here we may read the full story of the ignorant insolence of one Ayrton-an obscure politician who became a minister of the Crown, and proposed to make Kew into a mere pleasure-garden and to give his orders to Hooker as to a head-gardener, but was, by a timely rally of wiser statesmen and lovers of science, brought to heel like a whipped dog. Here too we read of the mean financial tricks of the East India Company, the delays of the Admiralty, the stupid parsimony of the Treasury relieved by the generosity and friendship of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, the goodwill of fine old Admirals and the enthusiasm of many high-placed officials (such as Bertram Mitford, Lord Redesdale) and well-tried friends who valued pure science and were spell-bound by Hooker's abilities, persistence, freedom from all desire for personal profit, and simpleminded devotion to one noble end-the building up of what were for him two inseparables, Kew and Botanical Science.

Hooker's more direct contributions to scientific botany are parallel in importance to the creation of the great institution (founded by his father and completed by the loyal help of his son-in-law and successor), wherein he worked out during many years the enormous collections of plants brought thither by himself, and amplified by official and private collections. His first scientific paper, on some new mosses, was written and published in 1837, when he was only twenty years of age; his last in 1911, on some Indian species of the Balsams (genus: Impatiens)— a large and difficult group to which he gave minute study, dissecting them under the microscope and drawing them with all the skill and assiduity of his youth, until within a few days of his death in his ninety-fifth year. The mere titles of the papers and volumes which Hooker produced in those seventy-four years of work occupy twenty pages in the 'Life.' No mere enumeration of their number can give an idea of their bulk, of the number of drawings and often coloured pictures which illustrate them, of the tireless industry which produced them, or of their scientific weight and purpose.

For the convenience of ready publication, he carried

on throughout his life (with the assistance in later years of other botanists, his chosen colleagues) 'Hooker's Icones Plantarum,' founded by his father in 1837, and the 'Botanical Magazine,' founded by William Curtis in 1787, which has appeared regularly every month during one hundred and thirty years! It was edited for forty years by Sir William Hooker, on whose death in 1865 Sir Joseph became editor and chief contributor, handing it over in 1904 to his successor as director of Kew, Sir William Thiselton Dyer. For seventy-eight years the two Fitches, uncle and nephew, were the only artistswithout rivals for the perfection of their work-employed on the production of the hundreds of plates picturing new or rare plants published in the 'Botanical Magazine.' But Hooker's greatest works were published as separate volumes, usually by the aid of grants from Government departments. Such were the 'Flora Antarctica' (1844-47), 2 vols, with 198 plates; the Flora Novæ Zælandiæ' (1853-55), with 130 plates; the 'Flora Tasmaniæ,' with 200 plates; and the Flora of British India' (by J. D. H. assisted by various botanists), 1872-1897, 7 vols. A great number of important papers of smaller bulk, but always of special significance, were published by him in the Transactions of the Linnæan Society, in the journal of the Geographical Society and other journals, and as contributions to the works of other authorities, British and Foreign.

Hooker did a vast amount of work with his own hands, his own pencil and pen. The mechanical work of sorting the 'hay-stacks'-as collections of dried plants are irreverently called-the selection of specimens for description and incorporation in the herbarium and of duplicates for distribution to other botanical institutions and individuals (a proceeding by which exchanges were obtained and the completeness of the Kew herbarium assured), was always a delight to him; the mechanical labour and the mere handling' of plants being, as he tells us, a relief from closer work and yet conducive to thought and reflection bearing on his one great purpose. Of course he had an efficient staff and distinguished botanists as volunteer assistants, attracted by the unique conveniences for study afforded by the great herbarium, the library and the working-rooms, for which by degrees,

following out and developing the cherished scheme of his father, he succeeded in getting the reluctant officials of the Treasury and the Board of Works to disburse the necessary funds.

The great interest for Hooker in all this accumulation of knowledge touching the flora of every part of the world, over and above the mere record of new plants and their habitat,' was the discovery of the causes which have led to the present geographical distribution of plants. The problem continually presented itself to him in his travels. Take for instance the following passage in a letter written to his father from the Thibet frontier in 1848

'To-day I went up the flanks of Donkiah to 19,300 feet. ... The mountains, especially Kinchin-jhow, are beyond all description beautiful; from whichever side you view this latter mountain, it is a castle of pure blue glacier ice, 4000 (sic) feet high and 6 or 8 miles long. I do wish I were not the only person who has ever seen it or dwelt among its wonders. . . . I was greatly pleased with finding my most Antarctic plant, Lecanora miniata, at the top of the Pass; and to-day I saw stony hills at 19,000 feet stained wholly orange-red with it, exactly as the rocks of Cockburn Island were in 64° South. Is not this most curious and interesting? To find the identical plant forming the only vegetation at the two extreme limits of vegetable life is always interesting; but to find it absolutely in both instances painting a landscape so as to render its colour conspicuous in each case five miles off, is wonderful.'

How does it come about that this plant flourishes in two such widely remote regions? How can we account for hundreds of other instances of the presence of identical plants in isolated localities thousands of miles apart, and for the absence of others in regions contiguous with one in which they abound?

The great botanists preceding Hooker had believed in the 'special creation' of this endless variety of species and widely differing grades and elaboration of vegetable life, as an ultimate fact. Buffon, at the end of the 18th century, had pointed out the connexion of climate with the distribution of plants, and argued that vegetation must have commenced where the cooling globe was first cold enough to support it, i.e. at a pole. He