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 304 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