SIR WILLIAM HOOKER
1785—1865
By F. O. BOWER
Early pursuits—appointed to Glasgow—Garden administration—teaching methods—appointed Director of Kew—state of Botany—vigorous development of Kew—serial publications—floristic work—descriptive work on Ferns—his record.
"Poeta nascitur non fit." A poet is born, not made. If this be true of poets, much more is it true of botanists. The man who takes up botany merely as a means of making a livelihood, rarely possesses that true spirit of the naturalist which is essential for the highest success in the Science. It is the boys who are touched with the love of organic Nature from their earliest years, who grub about hedgerows and woods, and by a sort of second sight appear to know instinctively, as personal friends, the things of the open country, who provide the material from which our little band of workers may best be recruited.
Such a boy was Sir William Hooker, the subject of this lecture. He was born in 1785, at Norwich. There is no detailed history of his boyhood, but it is known that in his school days he interested himself in entomology, in drawing, and in reading books of natural history, a rather unusual thing at the time of the Napoleonic wars! In 1805, when he was at the age of 20, he discovered a species new to Britain, in Buxbaumia aphylla, and his correspondence about it with Dawson Turner shows that he was already well versed not only in the flowering plants, but also in the Mosses, Hepaticae, Lichens, and fresh-water Algae of Norfolk, his native county. Three years later Sir James Smith dedicated to him the new genus
