At the RBGE, Edinburgh on 4th October 2017 at 1930hrs Dr Jim Endersby will be giving a lecture on
“Sir Joseph Hooker; putting plants in their place”. Entry is via the Library entrance on the eastern side of the gardens
The lecture is the inaugural talk in the Winter lecture series of the Caley. More details are available at
http://www.rchs.co.uk/events/lectures/Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, (1817 -191) was a botanist noted for his botanical travels and studies and for his encouragement of Charles Darwin and of Darwin’s theories. The younger son of Sir William Jackson Hooker, he was assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew from 1855 to 1865 and, succeeding his father, was then director from 1865 to 1885.
Hooker, unlike his father, had the benefit of a formal education and was graduated from the
University of Glasgow with an M.D., in 1839. Through his familiarity with his father’s herbarium, he was well prepared for the first of his many travels—as surgeon-botanist aboard HMS Erebus on the Antarctic expedition of 1839–43. Thereafter a steady stream of publications followed, punctuated by his own travels: The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of H.M. Discovery Ships Erebus and Terror in 1839–1843 (1844–60);
Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya (1849);
Handbook of the New Zealand Flora (1864); The Flora of British India (1872–97); and Journal of a Tour in Morocco and the Great Atlas (1878). His last major botanical expedition, to the Rocky Mountains and California (1877), led to the publication of several important papers concerning the relationship of American and Asian floras. His travels resulted in the discovery of species new to science, many of which were soon introduced to horticultural circles. Even more important, however, were the data, which gained him an international reputation as a plant geographer.
One of the most significant results of his travels was an attempt to explain the geographical distribution of plants and their seemingly anomalous variations. As a close friend of Charles Darwin and one well acquainted with the latter’s early work, Hooker, along with the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, presided at the historic meeting of the Linnean Society (London) in July 1858. It was their function to adjudicate the priority claims concerning natural selection as the mechanism for evolution, which had been advanced simultaneously by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. By lending his support to a scientific claim that was soon to be attacked on extra-scientific grounds, Hooker was among the first to demonstrate the importance and applicability of the evolutionary theory to botany in general and to plant geography in particular. The capstone to Hooker’s career came in 1883 with the publication of the final volume of the Genera Plantarum, written in conjunction with George Bentham. This world flora, describing 7,569 genera and approximately 97,000 species of seed-bearing plants, was based on a personal examination of the specimens cited, the vast majority of which were deposited at Kew.
