received, and have been answered, nearly every one of them, by the hands of the directors themselves.
The history of science furnishes few instances like this of prolonged devotion to a public enterprise so splendidly carried out as to become a national honor and a benefaction to the scientific world. The development of Kew is a noble work of art requiring genius, taste, enthusiasm and perseverance, as well as knowledge. The world had to be ransacked to accumulate his treasures, and those treasures are for the most part living things. The Hookers, father and son, have not only given a generation of incessant work to the organization of the Kew Gardens, but they have done it at a constant and large self-sacrifice. They contributed effort and money to the perfection of a work which is an honor to the government, and one would think that the least the government could do would be fairly to admit the obligation. But, under the Gladstone administration, the office of Commissioner of Public Works was conferred upon a narrow-minded blockhead named Ayrton, who looked upon science and its interests with the prejudice and contempt characteristic of politicians. His office placed him in charge of the Botanical Gardens as the superior to whom its director was responsible, and he began a course of meddlesome interference with the affairs of the establishment which was so insulting to Dr. Hooker, and would have been so injurious to the place, that the leading scientific men of England united in a protest to the government. The paper, signed by Lyell, Paget, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall, was drawn up by the latter gentleman, and presented the government in such a disgraceful attitude before the world, that Parliament took up the subject and put a check to the offensive treatment of Dr. Hooker by the arrogant and supercilious minister of public works. A man's work must be his monument, and Dr. Hooker may be well content with that; but, after what has taken place, the Government of England owes it to its own dignity to recognize in some fitting way the eminent services of the director of the Botanical Gardens.
Dr. Hooker stands high, not only as an indefatigable explorer, but also as a philosophic botanist; and he long since espoused the doctrine that the species of the world's present flora have been derived by descent and divergent modifications from ancient vegetable forms. He married a daughter of the Rev. J. S. Henslow, Professor of Botany in the University of Cambridge; and his wife is not only herself an accomplished botanist, but she shares in her husband's labors, and has recently translated a splendid work upon the subject from the French language.
