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Anniversary dinner of the Royal Society, Nov. 30, 1887.[Back to chapter]
This is the better version of the tale, as given in the Royal Society speech above mentioned. [Back to chapter]
The incident of the moss occurs in chapter xix of Park’s Travels, after he had been robbed by a party of Foulahs; the negro women’s compassion is an earlier incident of chapter xv. [Back to chapter]
Based on Devon Worthies, by the late Robert H. Hooker of Weston-super-Mare who erected the beautiful statue of the judicious Hooker in the Cathedral Close at Exeter. [Back to chapter]
George Vincent (1796-1836?), the landscape painter, was born and educated in Norwich. A pupil of John Crome, he exhibited, chiefly Norfolk views, at Norwich between 1811 and 1831, and in London 1814-31, where he lived from 1818. His etchings date between 1821 and 1827. [Back to chapter]
John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) was a landscape and portrait painter, chiefly in water-colours. He studied in London in 1798 and exhibited there 1800-6 and again 1825-39. He was Drawing Master in Norwich 1807-34, and in King’s Coll., London, 1834-42; etched plates of Norfolk buildings and antiquities 1811-39, and published etchings of ‘Architectural Antiquities of Normandy’ made in 1817-20 (see vol. ii. p. 197). [Back to chapter]
William Kirby (1759-1850), entomologist, nephew of J. J. Kirby: educated at Caius Coll., Cambridge, was an original Fellow of the Linnean Society 1788. He published a famous Introduction to Entomology (1815-26) with William Spence (1783-1860), F.R.S. 1818, Hon. President of the Entomological Society, to which he bequeathed his collection of insects. [Back to chapter]
Alexander Macleay (1767-1848), F.R.S. 1809, entomologist and Colonial Statesman; was Colonial Secretary for New South Wales 1825-37. [Back to chapter]
Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), President of the Royal Society, became a botanist in a burst of schoolboy enthusiasm. His ample inheritance enabled him to travel and to become a munificent patron of science. His most famous expedition was that with Captain Cook in the Endeavour, when he took with him, at his own expense, Dr. Solander, the pupil of Linnaeus, two draughtsmen, and two attendants. In 1778 he was elected P.R.S., and held the office till his death, exercising a generous but rather autocratic sway over the scientific world, for whom his great collections and library were always open, and his house in Soho Square a gathering point. He left his library and herbarium to Robert Brown, his librarian, for life, with reversion to the British Museum, not only leaving him £200 a year, but providing for the famous draughtsman, Francis Bauer, during his life, that he might continue his drawings from new plants at Kew. As scientific adviser to George III, he also arranged for collectors to gather plants for Kew from abroad. [Back to chapter]
Robert Graham (1786-1845), M.D. He practised some years in Glasgow, and in 1818, when a separate chair of botany was established at the University, Was appointed the first professor. In 1820 he became regius professor at Edinburgh, being succeeded at Glasgow by Sir William Hooker, with whom he had a scientific and personal friendship. Joseph Hooker, in turn, was within of succeeding him at Edinburgh, for he remained a close friend of the Hookers, often joining in Sir William’s botanical excursions, and when he fell ill in 1845, he secured Joseph Hooker as his substitute and prospective successor. [Back to chapter]
Sir Edward Sabine, K.C.B. (1788-1883), saw active service in the American war of 1812, but after 1816 devoted nearly all his life to science, especially astronomy and terrestrial magnetism. For his researches on these subjects when in the Arctic with Ross and Parry he received the Copley medal in 1821, and subsequently extended his researches half across the world. He, assisted by Ross and others, made the first systematic magnetic survey of the British Isles, and paying a visit to Berlin, prompted Humboldt to urge the establishment of magnetic observatories throughout the British Empire in connection with those already established elsewhere by other Governments, a proposal which led to Ross’s Antarctic expedition. Sabine was President of the Royal Society from 1861-71; he had been general secretary of the British Association 1839-59, except in 1852, when he was President. His magnum opus, which included a complete statement of the magnetic survey of the globe, extended over thirty-six years from 1840, in his series of ‘Contributions to Terrestrial Magnetism’ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. [Back to chapter]
Dawson Turner published important illustrated works on the British Fuci, the Mosses of Ireland, and especially the Natural History of Fuci, 1808-19, and, with L. W. Dillwyn, The Botanist’s Guide through England and Wales, 1805. Later he devoted himself especially to art and antiquities. He wrote largely on the archaeology of Norfolk and Suffolk, inter alia ‘Granger’ Blomefield’s History of Norfolk with 2000 drawings. His chief archaeological work was his Account of a Tour in Normandy, with fifty etchings by his wife and daughters and John Cotman. [Back to chapter]
Frank Garden and Robert Monteith lived with the Hookers for some four years, studying at Glasgow before proceeding to Cambridge (in 1827). ‘Our two eldest boys’, Sir William calls them: they were eight or nine years older than his own boys. [Back to chapter]
Charles Lyell (1767-1849), eldest son of Charles Lyell of Kinnordy, was distinguished both as a Dante scholar and a botanist. Living at Bartley in the New Forest from 1798 to 1825, he devoted himself especially to the study of the mosses, several species of which bear his name, as well as the genus Lyellia of Robert Brown. [Back to chapter]
S. J. Klotzsch spent some years as Sir William’s curator at Glasgow, and was the founder of the mycological portion of the herbarium. Subsequently he became keeper of the Royal Herbarium at Berlin. Hooker gives an amusing description of his oddities in the Memoirs of his father, p. xxxiii. [Back to chapter]
No doubt Charles, brother of (Sir) James Paget, the famous surgeon (1814-99), and one of the seventeen children of Samuel Paget, brewer and ship-owner, who was Mayor of Great Yarmouth in 1817. The Pagets, the Dawson-Turners, and the Hookers were closely allied in a friendship of long standing. Between 1830 and 1834 James was apprenticed to Dr. Costerton, and, with his brother Charles, wrote a book on the natural history of Great Yarmouth. [Back to chapter]
William Henry Harvey (1811-66), of Irish Quaker stock, began his lifelong friendship with Sir W. J. Hooker through his discovery at Killarney of the moss Hookeria laetevirens (1831). After holding various posts at Dublin he went in 1835 to South Africa with his brother, on whose death he succeeded in the post of Colonial Treasurer. In 1842 he broke down in body and mind from overwork. Returning home, he became Keeper of the University Herbarium at Dublin, and in 1848 Professor of Botany under the Royal Dublin Society. He visited America in 1849-70 - the Indian Ocean and Australasia in 1853-6, and on his return succeeded to the botanical chair at Trinity College, Dublin. His work included a Flora Capensis, but he is best known as an authority on Algae, publishing a Manual of British Algae (Laylor, 1841), the Phycologia Britannica, Nereis Australis, The Seaside Book (1849), Nereis Boreali-Americana, Phycologia Australica, as well as on the Antarctic Algae of Beechey’s Voyage, and to him J. D. H. refers his collection of Southern Algae. His work lay in ‘discrimination, description, and illustration’; he had no share in the Darwinian movement, though ready to admit natural selection as a vera causa of much change, he would not go so far as to admit it as a vera causa of species. [Back to chapter]
The continuator of Hume’s History of England. [Back to chapter]
William Wilson (1799-1871) was a botanist who had been attracted to the study during the open-air life necessitated by an early breakdown from overwork. In 1827 he was introduced by Henslow to Sir W. Hooker, and joined him in his annual students’ botanical excursion. Through Hooker he devoted himself to the mosses, and described the mosses collected on Ross’s Voyage. His great work, the Bryologia Britannica (1855), though intended to be a third edition of W. J. Hooker’s Muscologia, was substantially a new work of the highest merit. Among the new species added to the British Flora by Wilson, his name is preserved in the rose named after him by Borrer, and the Killarney filmy fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) by Sir W. Hooker. [Back to chapter]
Perhaps Stephen Glover (d. 1869), known for his Peak Guide, 1830, and History of the County of Derby, 1831-3. [Back to chapter]
George Arnott Walker Arnott (1799-1868), who had given up the law for botany, was a close friend of Sir W. Hooker, with whom he collaborated from 1830-40 in describing the plants of Beechey’s voyage, and in 1850 in the sixth edition of the British Flora. In 1839 he acted as Sir William’s substitute, and from 1845 till his death held the Glasgow chair of Botany. [Back to chapter]
This Thomas Thomson (1817-78), naturalist and traveller, was the eldest son of Thomas Thomson, Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow from 1817. A schoolfellow of the Hooker boys, he was equally devoted to science, and at the age of seventeen did some remarkable original work in geology, and later, no less original chemical work under Liebig. He graduated M.D. in 1839 with the Hookers, and entered the service of the East India Company as assistant surgeon. He had a perilous adventure during the invasion of Afghanistan, ill-famed for the massacre of the Khoord Kabul, for he was captured by the Afghans at Ghazni, and narrowly escaped being sold into slavery in Bokhara, 1842. Meantime, as later during the Sutlej campaign and his subsequent stay in the Punjaub, he studied Indian and Himalayan botany. As one of the commissioners for marking the boundary between Kashmir and Chinese Tibet in 1847, he travelled into little known regions, embodying his geological and botanical observations in his book, Travels in the Western Himalayas and Tibet, in 1852. At the end of 1849 he joined Hooker at Darjeeling, and travelled with him for fifteen months on his later expeditions, especially to the Khasia Mountains. Returning to England in broken health, he spent several years at Kew, working at his collections, and bringing out, in collaboration with Hooker, the first and only volume of the Flora Indica. From 1854 to 1861, he was again In India as superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in succession to Dr. Falconer, Professor of Botany. Later he lived again for a time at Kew. [Back to chapter]
Sir John Richardson (1787-1865, and knighted 1846) saw much active service as naval surgeon, 1807-15, then returned to Edinburgh and took his M.D., at the same time studying botany and mineralogy. He was Naturalist to Sir John Franklin on two Arctic expeditions, 1819-22 and 1825-27. For ten years he was head of the Melville Hospital at Chatham, and from 1838 was physician to the Royal Hospital at Haslar, where young naval surgeons awaiting their gazetting to ships were under him. Again, in 1848-9 he led the expedition in search of Franklin. His second wife, m. 1833, d. 1845, was a niece of Franklin’s. In addition to his works on Polar Zoology and Travel, his special subject was Fishes. [Back to chapter]
Sir John Bowring (1792-1872), merchant, linguist, traveller, diplomatist, financial reformer, and man of letters. Among his varied activities he was editor of the Westminster Review on its foundation by Jeremy Bentham; M.P. for the Clyde Burghs 1835-7, and for Bolton 1841; an original founder of the Anti-Corn Law League with Cobden, and plenipotentiary in China during the troubled times from 1854. Having newly returned in 1838 from a Government commercial mission through Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, he was fresh from the exasperating methods of quarantine in the East, which took shape in the Observations on Oriental Plague and Quarantines which startled the youthful Hooker. [Back to chapter]
William Buckland (1784-1856), wit, geologist, and divine, who was Professor of Mineralogy, 1813, and Reader in Geology, 1819, at Oxford, President of the Geological Society, 1824, and Dean of Westminster, 1845. His work, which was valuable and suggestive, included the proof that the’ dressed rocks ‘of this country were the result of planing by glacial ice-sheet; nevertheless orthodoxy, alarmed at the claims of other geologists, smiled upon him, for in his inaugural address he calmed these fears, and in his ‘Reliquiae Diluvianae’ (1823) he employed his great knowledge and intuition to correlate the cave remains with the deluge. His famous Bridgewater Treatise of 1836 was another buttress of science as applied to contemporary theology. His drollery and quaint stories were famous. [Back to chapter]
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