Page:The Journal of Indian Botany.djvu/316

274 THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN BOTANY. worked were often badly preserved, badly mounted, and without notes, even of the colour of the flowers. He insisted much upon the necessity for observation in the field. Comparing the Indian with the Australian flora, he remarked that many typical forms from the Indian tropics exist in Australia, but no Australian plants seem to have found their way to India, although the eucalyptus flourishes when planted on Indian soil.

After his return from India, Joseph Hooker became his father's assist- ant at Kew, and it was not until 1860 that he undertook another botanical expedition. This was to Palestine and the results of his travels there were afterwards condensed into a masterly sketch of the Botany of Syria and Palestine for Smith's Bible Dictionary. His chief ambition was to ascend Mount Lebanon and examine the Cedars, comparing them with the Indian deodars. He found them decadent, no seedling being apparently able to survive the present dry climate, so that all the existing trees were from 50 to 500 years old. At 3,000 to 4,000 feet, he found the Lebanon scenery "Tibetan and wretched", and above 8,000 feet, the vegetation was extremely scanty. There was but one alpine or arctic plant, Oxyria reniformis, and that grew only at the summit and was very rare '• he con- cluded that this indicates the same change of climate as is shown by the cedars, and that other arctics which probably existed there in earlier times when the climate was more moist have been expelled by the increasing drought. Their absence is characteristic of the mountains of Asia Minor also and of Morocco as Hooker himself found later. The Cedars of Leba- non he strongly held to be of the same species as the Indian Deodars, these being two extreme forms of one extinct type and their difference of habit due to the contrasted climates of dry Lebanon and humid Himalaya, espe- cially as he had seen the two forms growing side by side at Dropmore and looking quite alike. His paper on the whole genus includes observations on the Cedars of Algeria, Lebanon, the Taurus, and India.

Eleven years later, in 1871, Hooker went to botanize in Morocco, look, ing forward to " tasting the delights of savagery again", and fufilling another childish ambition, inspired by Mungo Park's Travels, of ascend- ing the Great Atlas. He found it politic to pose as- the hakim and gardener of the Great Sultana Victoria, and the people believed he was searching for a herb which would enable her to live for ever ! Here the labour of collecting and of drying in the moist atmosphere, would have been " almost intolerable, but for the compensating pleasures ". Often his collaborator Ball would work by their one candle till about 2 a.m., and then Hooker would take up the task until morning. He decided that the flora of the Atlas was the dying out of the European flora, and the differ- ence on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar emphasised the antiquity of the severance.

Hooker's last botanical expedition, undertaken at the age of sixty, was made in company with Asa Gray, who was five or six years older, but the two elderly botanists were indefatigable in their survey of the North American flora, although their journey from East to West included an ascent of a peak 14,500 feet high in the Rockies, where for five hours they had to force their way through thick forest, and a ten days' wagon journey across the Sierra Nevada to the Yosemite Valley. The two problems which they were most anxious to solve were Gray's of the connection between the plants of the Eastern States with those of East Asia and Japan, and Hooker's of the hard line of division between the Arctic flora of America and Greenland. They agreed that both might have resulted from a glacial period and a former connection with an Arctic continent. The warm- climate types of plants now found in North Polar regions as fossils had