“I will gladly help you all I can; so have no scruples. . . . You are right to make the book uncompromisingly scientific. It will be greatly valued.
I am getting so old and oblivious that I fear I may not be of much use.”
And a few weeks later (24th Feb. 1899):—
“I had no idea that your father had kept my letters. Your account of 742 pp. of them is a revelation. I do enjoy re-reading your father’s; as to my own, I regard it as a punishment for my various sins of blindness, perversity, and inattention to his thousand and one facts and hints that I did not profit by as much as I should have, all as revealed by my letters.”
In 1907 he received the Order of Merit, the Insignia being conveyed to him by Colonel Douglas Dawson from the King. I had the honour of being the only person present on the occasion, though why Sir Joseph allowed me this pleasure I cannot guess. I remember Colonel Dawson in vain trying to persuade Sir Joseph not to see him to his carriage at the door. I have, too, a picture of Sir Joseph fidgeting round the room afterwards, unwillingly wearing the collar to please his family.
In 1908 he took the chief part in the fiftieth anniversary of the Darwin-Wallace papers of 1858. He characteristically begged the Darwins to tell him if they entertained “the smallest doubt of the expediency or propriety of telling the public the part” which he took on that historic occasion!
He was also the chief guest at the 1909 celebration at Cambridge of the centenary of Darwin’s birth. I recollect him wandering about at the evening reception, quite unconsciously the object of all eyes. Unfortunately, Hooker was not present
at the banquet, where, as Mr L. Huxley says, “Mr Balfour’s historic speech was only eclipsed by the sense of personal charm in Mr W. E. Darwin’s reminiscences of his father” (ii., p. 467).
It is delightful to find Hooker in 1911 vigorously corresponding with Dr Bruce, a “brother Antarctic.” He writes to Bruce, 20th February 1911, “I return herewith the proof-sheets, which I have perused with extraordinary interest and an amount of instruction and information that I never expected to receive at my age” (Life, ii., p. 478). It is touching that in extreme old age the first work that occupied his youth should still find so clear an echo in his vigorous old age.
Mr Huxley records (ii., p. 480) that though Sir Joseph “kept at work till but a little before the end,” his physical strength began to fail in the late summer; but his mental powers were undimmed. He died in his sleep on 10th December 1911, and was buried (as he had desired) near his father’s grave at Kew.