(From the photograph by Mrs Cameron, 1868)
Sir Joseph Hooker was born at Halesworth, in Suffolk, in 1817. His father, Sir William Hooker, brought him to Glasgow as a child of four years of age, when he entered on his duties as Professor of Botany in 1821. The Professor established himself in Woodside Crescent, conveniently near to the Botanic Garden, then but recently established, but developing under his hands with wonderful rapidity. Doubtless his little son was familiar with it and its contents from childhood. He grew up in an atmosphere surcharged with the very science he was to do so much to advance. His father's home was the scene of manifold activities. It housed a rapidly growing herbarium and museum. It was there that the drawings were made to illustrate that amazing stream of descriptive works which Sir William was then producing. New species must have been almost daily under examination, often as living specimens. Between the garden and the house the boy must have witnessed constantly, during the most receptive years of childhood, the working of an establishment that was at the time without its equal in this country, or probably in any other. The eye and the memory must have been trained almost unconsciously. A knowledge of plants would be acquired as a natural consequence of the surroundings, and without the effort entailed by study in later years. Few ever have known, or ever will know, plants as he did. Such knowledge comes only from growing up with them from earliest childhood.
Side by side with this almost unconscious education in Botany the ordinary curriculum of school and of college was pursued. There is no record of academic successes either at the High School, or at the University of Glasgow, beyond a prize "for the best Essay on the Brain and Nerves," in 1836. But the following year saw his first publication: for he described, while still a student, three new species of Mosses. It may be remarked that, like his father, his first writings related to the lower Plants. He never lost his interest in them, though in later years duty diverted him to the study of the Flowering Plants. An incident of his student period, which he himself relates, is, however, a more clear indication of the life that was to follow than any early publication of new species. He tells how an opportunity was given him of reading the proofs of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. "I was hurrying on my studies (that is for the final examination in Medicine) ... and so pressed for time was I that I used to sleep with the sheets of 'The Journal' under my pillow, that I might read them between waking and rising. They impressed me profoundly, whilst they stimulated me to enthusiasm in the desire to travel and observe." The opportunity came to him almost at once in the four years' voyage to the Antarctic. At the age of 22, having passed his examinations, and graduated as M.D., he was equipped at every necessary point for his duties as Assistant Surgeon and Botanist in the "Erebus," then about to start, along with the "Terror," on the famous voyage under the command of Sir James Clark Ross.
No attempt will here be made to give any consecutive biographical sketch of Sir Joseph Hooker. Several such have already appeared. The interest of the reader will be more readily engaged by indicating the various lines of activity in which he excelled. He was never a professional teacher, except for a short period of service as deputy for Graham in Edinburgh. There was a moment when he might have been Professor in Edinburgh, but it passed. He left no pupils, except in the sense that all botanists have learned from him through his books. We shall contemplate him rather as a Traveller and Geographer, as a Geologist, as a Morphologist, as an Administrator, as a Scientific Systematist, and above all as a Philosophical Biologist. He played each of these several parts in the Drama of Science. The endeavour will be made, however imperfectly, to touch upon them all.
The experiences of Hooker as a traveller began immediately after taking his degree, with his commission in 1839 as Assistant Surgeon and Botanist in the "Erebus." Scientific Exploration was still in its heroic age. Darwin was only three years back from the voyage of the "Beagle." We may well hold the years from 1831, when the "Beagle" sailed, to 1851, when Hooker returned from his Indian journey, or 1852, when Wallace returned from the Amazon, to have been its golden period. Certainly it was if we measure by results. Unmatched opportunity for travel in remote and unknown lands was then combined with unmatched capacity of those who engaged in it. Nor was this a mere matter of chance. For Darwin, Wallace, and Hooker all seized, if they did not in some measure make, their opportunity.
The intrepid Ross, with his two sailing ships, the "Erebus" and the "Terror," probed at suitable seasons during four years the extreme south. The very names of the Great Ice Barrier, M'Murdo Sound, Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, made familiar to us by adventures seventy years later under steam, remain to mark some of his additions to the map of the world. Young Hooker took his full share of risks, up to the point of being peremptorily ordered back on one occasion by his commanding officer. To his activity and willingness, combined with an opportunity that can never recur in the same form, is due that great collection of specimens, and that wide body of fact which he acquired. On the outward and return voyages, or in the intervals when the season was not favourable for entering the extreme southern seas, the expedition visited Ascension, St Helena, the Cape, New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, Kerguelen Island, Tierra del Fuego, and the Falkland Islands. The prime object of the voyage was a magnetic survey, and this determined its course. But it brought this secondary consequence; that Hooker had the chance of observing and collecting upon all the great circumpolar areas of the southern hemisphere. The results he later welded together into his first great work, The Antarctic Flora.
Very soon after his return from the Antarctic the craving for travel broke out afresh in him. He longed to see a tropical Flora in a mountainous country, and to compare it at different levels with that of temperate and arctic zones. Two alternatives arose before him: the Andes and the Himalaya. He chose the latter, being influenced by promises of assistance from Dr Falconer, the Superintendent of the Calcutta Garden. But before he left England his journey came under the recognition of Government. He not only received grants on the condition that the collections made should be located in the Herbarium at Kew, but he was accredited by the Indian Government to the Rulers, and the British Residents, in the countries whose hitherto untrodden ways he was to explore. After passing the cold season of 1848 in making himself acquainted with the vegetation of the plains and hills of Western Bengal, he struck north to the Sikkim Himalaya. Hither he had been directed by Lord Auckland and by Dr Falconer, as to ground unbroken by traveller or naturalist. The story of this remarkable journey, its results and its vicissitudes, including the forcible detention of himself and his companion Dr Campbell by a faction of the Court of Sikkim, is to be found in his Himalayan Journals. These most fascinating volumes of travel were published in 1854. They tell how he spent two years in the botanical exploration and topographical survey of the state of Sikkim, and of a number of the passes leading into Thibet; and how towards the close of 1848 he even crossed the western frontier of Sikkim, and explored a portion of Nepal that has never since been open to travellers. In 1849 he returned to Darjeeling, and busied himself with arranging his vast collections. Here he was joined by an old fellow-student of Glasgow, Dr Thomas Thomson, son of the professor of that name. The two friends spent the year 1850 in the botanical investigation of Eastern Bengal, Chittagong, Silhet, and the Khasia hills. In 1851 they returned together to England.
The botanical results of these Indian journeys were immense, and they provided the material for much of Hooker's later scientific writing. Nearly 7000 species of Indian plants were collected by these two Glasgow graduates. But Hooker was not a mere specialist. His Journals are full of other observations, ethnographical, ornithological, and entomological. His topographical results especially were of the highest importance. They formed the basis of a map published by the Indian Topographical Survey. By the aid of it the operations of various campaigns and political missions have since been carried to a successful issue. If he were not known as a Botanist, he would still have his assured place as a Geographer.
After his return from India, nine years ensued of quiet work at home. But in 1860 Hooker took part in a scientific visit to Syria and Palestine, ascending Mount Lebanon, where he specially paid attention to the decadent condition of the Cedars, his observations leading later to a general discussion of the genus. Again a period of ten years intervened, his next objective being Morocco. In 1871, with Mr Ball and Mr Maw, he penetrated the Atlas Range, never before examined botanically. His last great journey was in 1877, when he was sixty years of age. With his old friend, Prof. Asa Gray of Harvard, he visited Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and California. Prof. Coulter of Chicago, who was one of the party in the Rockies, has told me how difficult it was to round up the two elderly enthusiasts to camp at night.
This is an extraordinary record of travel, especially so when we remember that all the journeys were fitted into the intervals of an otherwise busy life of scientific work and administration. At one time or another he had touched upon every great continental area of the earth's surface. Many isolated islands had also been examined by him, especially on the Antarctic voyage. Not only were fresh regions thus opened up for survey and collection, but each objective of the later journeys was definitely chosen for scientific reasons. Each expedition helped to suggest or to solve major problems. Such problems related not only to the distribution, but also to the very origin of species. Darwin saw this with unerring judgment as early as 1845. Hooker was then but twenty-eight years old, and the records of the Antarctic voyage were only in preparation. Nevertheless Darwin wrote with full assurance in a letter to Hooker himself: "I know I shall live to see you the first authority in Europe on that grand subject, that almost keystone of the laws of Creation, Geographical Distribution." Never was a forecast more fully justified. But that position, which Hooker undoubtedly had, could only have been attained through his personal experience as a traveller. Observation at first hand was the foundation upon which he chiefly worked. Hooker the traveller prepared the way for Hooker the philosopher.