He was still astonishingly vigorous; at eighty-two he was “younger than ever,” though at ninety-three he confessed to being lazy in his old age.
In 1885 and subsequent years he was, as I gratefully remember, employed in helping me in the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. I could not have had a kinder or wiser collaborator.
Hooker’s unaffected modesty came out again about this period. In 1887 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, an honour which is the pinnacle of scientific ambition, and is open to foreigners as well as British subjects. He wrote in regard to the award, “I never once thought of myself as within the pale of it.” And in a letter to W. E. Darwin, “The success of my after-dinner homily at the R. S. is to me far more wonderful than getting the Copley. You . . . can guess my condition of two days’ nausea before the dinner, and 2 days of illness after it. I am not speaking figuratively.”
We find Hooker here and there slashing at contemporary methods of education. For instance, in regard to the mass of public school boys: “Not one of them can now translate a simple paper in
Latin or Greek, or will look into a classical author, or listen to the talk about one.” Mathematicians fared no better. He wrote in 1893:—“What you say of A, B, and C does not surprise me. They are ne plus ultra mathematicians, and have not a conception of biological science, and in fact are only half-intellects (I suppose I deserve to be burned).”
It is pleasant to find that Hooker allowed himself time to indulge his love of art. He was especially fond of old Wedgwood ware, and corresponded with William Darwin—a fellow amateur. In 1895, he allowed the same friend to become the owner of some old Wedgwood ware; and when the sale was completed Hooker speaks of its being a relief “to feel that the crockery is going back where it should have gone by rights.” [133] Elsewhere (ii., p. 360) Hooker discourses pleasantly on the perfect adaption to its end of the old Wedgwood ware. An old teapot, for instance, avoids all the faults of the modern article, in lifting which “you scald your knuckles against the body of the pot”; then the lid shoots off and you scald your other hand in trying to save it; the tea shoots out and splashes over the teacup; lastly the “spout dribbles when you set the pot down.” All these sins are provided against in the old Wedgwood teapot.
The Flora of British India having been finished, he was asked to complete the handbook to the Flora of Ceylon, interrupted by the death of Trimen, and this occupied him for three years. He was then led to what was to be his final piece of work, namely, a
study of the difficult group of the Balsams (Impatiens), and he certainly was not coloured by what he worked in, for the whole stock of his admirable patience was needed for this difficult research. His perseverance was a by-product of his noble enthusiasm. In 1906, when he was eighty-nine years of age, he writes enthusiastically to a friend in the East expressing his longing for more Balsams, and concluding, “I do love Indian Botany.” And in 1909 he hears that the Paris Herbarium had overlooked forty sheets of Indo-Chinese specimens—and writes, “This is like a stroke of paralysis to a man approaching his ninety-third year, but it is no use grumbling, my eyes are as good as ever, and my fingers are as agile as ever, and I am indeed thankful.”
The Life of Hooker is enriched by a striking essay from the pen of Professor Bower. He points out (ii., p. 412) that “few, if indeed any, have ever known plants as he did. Such knowledge comes only from growing up with them from earliest childhood.” Professor Bower adds that Hooker “shared with Darwin that wider outlook upon the field of Science that gave a special value to the writings of both”; and he adds, “The Himalayan Journals ranks with Darwin’s Voyage of the ‘Beagle’.”
When More Letters of Charles Darwin was in preparation, Hooker was appealed to for assistance, and wrote a characteristically kind letter (1st Feb. 1899) to one of the editors:—