Yours of June 9-21 reached me the very day that I mailed my last missive to you, a good long letter. Here is a fine letter from you, showing how busy and active a man you are. Pretty well for a man of your age to be shinning up palm-trees, and barking your shins. Be careful! Grisebach will take your criticisms all right, no doubt. Yesterday I got the inclosed from him. Very well. Is the Cuban M. Sauvalle?...
Dr. Hooker has sent me a specimen of Welwitschia, that queer African tree a foot high, many years old, and with only two leaves, and those all in shreds....
September 5.
... Dear, good Sir William Hooker is dead,—of diphtheria,—on the 15th August, six weeks over eighty years. I have no news yet from the family; but learn indirectly that Dr. Hooker is sick, “a gastric affection.” I do hope it is nothing dangerous....
Dr. Gray wrote for the “American Journal of Science”[61] a memoir of his dear friend, Sir William Hooker, in which, after describing his immense labors in publications of so many different branches, he says:—
“Our survey of what Sir William Hooker did for science would be incomplete indeed if it were confined to his published works, numerous and important as they are, and the wise and efficient administration through which, in a short space of twenty-four years, a queen’s flower and kitchen garden and pleasure grounds have been transformed into an imperial botanical establishment of unrivaled interest and value. Account should be taken of the spirit in which he worked, of the researches and explorations he promoted, of the aid and encouragement he extended to his fellow-laborers, especially to young and rising botanists, and of the means and appliances he gathered for their use no less than his own.
“The single-mindedness with which he gave himself to his scientific work, and the conscientiousness with which he lived for science while he lived by it, were above all praise. Eminently fitted to shine in society ... he never dissipated his time and energies in the round of fashionable life, but ever avoided the social prominence and worldly distractions which some sedulously seek....
“Nor was there in him the least manifestation of a tendency to overshadow the science with his own importance, or of indifference to its general advancement....
“To the wide circle of botanists in which he has long filled so conspicuous a place, ... it is superfluous to say that Sir William Hooker was one of the most admirable of men, a model Christian gentleman.”
Dr. Gray was appointed by Mr. Peabody himself a member of the “Board of Trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology in connection with Harvard University” when it was founded in 1866. The Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, offering the resolutions in memory of Dr. Gray, at the meeting in 1888, says, “From first to last, as I can bear witness, he was a most faithful and valuable member of our Board; he was always at our meetings and took an active interest in all our work. In 1874, on the death of Jeffries Wyman, he voluntarily assumed the curatorship of our Museum, and did excellent service until the appointment of Professor Putnam.”