the whole it seems to me a remarkable fact that Hooker’s conversion to evolution was such a slow affair. As Mr Huxley points out, “The partial light thrown on the question in fragmentary discussions was not enough, and until 1858–59, after the consolidation of Darwin’s arguments in the famous Abstract [The Origin of Species], Hooker . . . worked avowedly on the accepted lines of the fixity of species, for which he had so far found no convincing substitute.”
It is pleasant to read Darwin’s warm-hearted words: [127a] “You may say what you like, but you will never convince me that I do not owe you ten times as much as you can owe me” (30th Dec. 1858).
Hooker’s importance in the world was ever on the increase, and this had also its usual concomitant drawbacks. Huxley wrote to him [127b] on 19th December 1860: “It is no use having any false modesty about the matter. You and I, if we last ten years longer—and you by a long while first—will be representatives of our respective lines in the country. In that capacity we shall have certain duties to perform, to ourselves, to the outside world, and to Science. We shall have to swallow praise, which is no great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous bastings and irritations.” And this was doubtless a true prophecy for both the friends.
Hooker’s work—both his botanical research and duties of a more public character—was ever on the increase.
In the first category comes the Genera Plantarum, a gigantic piece of work begun with the co-operation
of Bentham in the ’60’s, and continued until 1883. The aim of this celebrated publication was no less than to give a revised definition of every genus of flowering plants. If this had been the only publication by the two friends, it had been enough to found a high and permanent place in the botanical world. But as far as Hooker was concerned, it may almost be said to have been carried out in his spare moments. It should be remembered that for part of this period he was aided in the management of the Gardens by Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, who began as Hooker’s Private Secretary and was then made Assistant Director. [128a]
The Presidency of the Royal Society, which Hooker held 1873–78, was clearly a great strain, but he carried out the work (which is in fact that of a ministry of science) with conspicuous success.
In January 1873 he wrote to Darwin:—“I quite agree as to the awful honour of P. R. S. . . . but, my dear fellow, I don’t want to be crowned head of science. I dread it—‘Uneasy is the head, etc.’—and my beloved Gen. Plant. will be grievously impeded.” It gives some idea of the strain of his work as a whole when we find him writing [128b] to Darwin (Jan. 14, 1875): “I have 15 Committees of the R[oyal] S[ociety] to attend to. I cannot tell you what a relief they are to me—matters are so ably and quietly conducted by Stokes, Huxley, and Spottiswoode that to me they are of the same sort of relaxation that metaphysics are to Huxley.”
He speaks, [128c] too (1874), of the annual conversazione
as “a tremendous affair. . . . How I did pity the President of the United States.” I am reminded of an American caricature of the President of the United States with red, swollen fingers, inscribed:—“The hand we have shaken so often.” With regard to other honours, he declined at once the K.C.M.G.; he then began to dread a K.C.B.; finally he was trapped into the K.C.S.I., an honour which most men would desire quite as much as Hooker longed to decline it.