Hooker, William Jackson

Hooker, William Jackson

(b. Norwich, England, 6 July 1785; d. Kew, England, 12 August 1865), botany.

Hooker was the son of Joseph Hooker, a merchant’s clerk who collected succulents, and Lydia Vincent. To fit him for the considerable property he was to inherit from his godfather, Hooker was given a gentleman’s education, first at Norwich Grammar School, where John Crome was drawing master, then at Starston Hall, where he learned estate management from Robert Paul. In 1820 he was given the LL.D. by the University of Glasgow, and in 1845 he was honored with the D.C.L. by Oxford.

His early interests were diffuse-ornithology vied with entomology, entomology with botany. Then, in 1804, when he was only nineteen, Hooker discovered a moss new to Britain that was identified as Buxbaumia aphylla by James Edward Smith, owner of Linnaeus’ herbarium. Smith introduced Hooker to Dawson Turner of Great Yarmouth, a banker, antiquarian, and leading cryptogamist who became his patron and later his father-in-law. Turner asked Hooker to illustrate his Historia fucorum, a project that took thirteen years to complete. of the finished plates, 234 of a total of 258 are by Hooker’s hand.

Other honors came to Hooker early. In 1805 William Kirby, a divine and entomologist, dedicated to him and his brother Joseph a new species of Apion they had discovered. In 1806 he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society, being then just twenty-one, the earliest admissible age. In 1808 Smith named for him the beautiful moss Hookeria lucens and its genus.

Through Turner, Hooker met Sir Joseph Banks, who in 1809 arranged for him to be included in a diplomatic mission to Iceland. He was the first to botanize there. Hooker lost all his specimens and almost lost his life, however, when the ship caught fire on the homeward journey. He was nevertheless able to publish his journal of the expedition, composed mostly from memory, in 1811. A second edition, in 1813, was dedicated to Banks, who promised to send him on another trip.

Hooker hoped to go to Ceylon, and prepared himself by copying more than 2,000 drawings of Indian plants in the India House museum; a rebellion in Ceylon made the proposed visit impossible. He then wished to go to Java in response to an offer from Lord Bathurst to pay for living plants and information about spice-bearing trees in the Dutch East Indies; his patron Turner persuaded him against that island as being notoriously malarious.

Banks was angered by this interference in his plans for Hooker, but Turner saw a better future for his protégé in England. He urged Hooker to buy a quarter share in the Turner family brewery at Halesworth, Suffolk, give up his interest in entomology, and settle down to serious botany. Hooker did all of these things and in 1815 he married Maria, his patron’s eldest daughter. of their five children, Joseph Dalton Hooker, the second-born, became a famous botanist and his father’s successor.

Hooker spent twelve years at Halesworth, during which he produced his British Jungermanniae, with his own illustrations, widely considered to be his most beautiful work. This book established hepaticology as an independent entity and made Hooker’s reputation. He also wrote four books on mosses during this period, as well as papers for the Linnean Society. London’s scientific society welcomed him, and eminent foreign botanists visited him at Halesworth where his herbarium was fast becoming the largest privately held. His guests there included A. P. de Candolle, Robert Brown, Francis Boott, C. Mertens, and the eighteen-year-old John Lindley, whom Hooker started on his botanical career.

In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, times were bad, and the brewery at Halesworth began to lose money. In 1820, when the regius professorship of botany at the University of Glasgow fell vacant, Banks procured it for Hooker. Hooker left for Scotland singularly well prepared as a botanist: he knew thoroughly the plants of his native East Anglia, where three-quarters of Britain’s flora was represented, and had completed his study by extensive walking tours in England, Ireland, and Scotland; he had gained a knowledge of foreign plants by studying the herbaria of Linnaeus and others, and in 1814 by a botanizing expedition on the Continent (where he met the leading European scientists, including Lamarck, Mirbel, and Humboldt, who engaged him to write the cryptogamic section of his book on South American botany); he had laid out a small but interesting botanical garden for Simon Wilkin; and he had induced new exotic plants to flower in his greenhouse at Halesworth. He had, however, never lectured, nor had he ever attended a lecture on any subject, let alone botany.

This last factor proved no drawback, and Hooker was an instant success; his charm and eloquence, his rich knowledge of plants and plant life, and, above all, his love of his subject captivated his students. He developed his own teaching materials, including a magnificent series of folio-sized colored drawings, mainly of medicinal plants, which he hung around his classroom. Since no suitable textbook existed, he wrote Flora scotica, published in 1821 (the year he took up permanent residence in Glasgow), in which the flowering plants were arranged according to the Linnaean system, while such orders as the cryptogams were classified according to the natural system, the first time this had been used in a book on indigenous plants. He inaugurated botanizing expeditions to the West Highlands, and to help his students understand the economic applications of plants he began the collection that later was to form the nucleus for his Museum of Economic Botany.

Hooker’s lectures were so popular that they attracted private citizens and even officers from the barracks three miles away. He opened his course with a few introductory lectures on the history of botany and the general character of plant life. In succeeding lectures he devoted the first half of each hour to organography, morphology, and classification of plants, and the second half to the analysis of specimens, mainly drawn from his own herbarium.

Hooker also began a collection of lithographed illustrations of the organs of plants, which in the first edition, of 1822, were his own work. He then discovered the talents of Walter Hood Fitch, a patterndrawer in a Glasgow calico-printing works. Under Hooker’s training in botanical draftsmanship, Fitch became one of the greatest British practitioners of that art. An enlarged edition of Hooker’s Botanical Illustrations, with plates by Fitch, was published in 1837. In the same year Hooker published Icones Plantarum ; the thousand figures were again by Fitch.

In the light of Hooker’s future career, perhaps the most significant feature of his work in Glasgow was his improvement of that city’s botanic garden. He had found it a poor affair, with only 8,000 species of plants. When he left, 20,000 species grew there, and it was the equal of any garden in Europe.

In 1836 Hooker was knighted for his services to botany. In spite of his many contributions to that field, however, his most important work was yet to come. Banks, director of the royal pleasure garden at Kew, had confided to Hooker his ambition of making it “a great exchange house of the Empire, where possibilities of acclimatizing plants might be tested,” as he had written to George III. Upon Banks’s death in 1820 the Kew collections stood in danger of being dispersed, and Hooker began a long campaign to save Kew for the nation. He pursued the project among influential people and officialdom through several changes of government. In 1840, through the close cooperation of Lindley and John Russell, sixth duke of Bedford, Hooker’s scheme to establish a national botanic garden was accepted. The gardens were given to the nation, and Hooker became their first director in 1841.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew which Hooker took over comprised only eleven acres and had no library or herbarium. Hooker generously allowed botanists access to his own, which occupied thirteen rooms of his house, West Park. Since his herbarium was the largest and most valuable in private hands, West Park attracted scientists from all over the world.

In 1842 W. A. Nesfield began landscaping the great avenues, grasslands, and vistas of modern Kew. At the same time Hooker began to replan and rebuild the glasshouses, which he had found to be inadequate. His crowning achievement was the Palm House, an exquisite winged structure completed in 1848 to the design of Decimus Burton. (Other claims for the architecture of the Palm House were made for Richard Turner, in whose Dublin foundry the curvilinear ironwork was made, while Joseph Hooker, in his “Sketch of the Life and Labours of Sir William Hooker,” stated that his father’s ideas were contributory, as they well may have been.) By 1846, when Hooker had been at Kew for only five years, he had increased the gardens to their present size of nearly 300 acres. As a liberal innovation the gardens were opened to the public.

Hooker superintended everything and created many prospects of the gardens himself, including the lake and the walk he made to receive the Sikkim rhododendrons discovered in the Himalayas by his son Joseph. The collections were vastly increased and specimens were brought from all over the world; Hooker’s former students sailed with every government expedition and were based in every quarter of the globe, while Hooker’s talent for making friends secured him new exotics from private garden-owners who employed their own plant hunters. Further, Hooker was instrumental in establishing botanic gardens in the new colonies of Queen Victoria’s everexpanding empire, which provided yet more plants for Kew.

In 1847 Hooker founded the Museum of Economic Botany, the first of its kind. Here specimens of vegetable products and materials were displayed for the benefit of manufacturers, tradesmen, and craftsmen. The museum received contributions from many sources, including the 1855 French International Exhibition, the Admiralty, and the Board of Trade; it was so popular with the public, and became so crowded with exhibits, that a second building was opened in 1857, and a third in 1863.

Hooker pursued the practical applications of botany. He attacked the problem of malaria in India when, in 1859, he sent Clements Markham to Peru to acquire living plants of Cinchona, a cheap source of quinine. After acclimatization at Kew, the plants were established in the Nilghiri Hills. Further successful experiments at Kew resulted in the acclimatization of tussock grass, timber trees, and a number of farm crops for colonial lands, by which they were made habitable and prosperous.

In 1855 Joseph Hooker became his father’s assistant at Kew, succeeding him upon his death ten years later. The nation’s monument to the elder Hooker was the purchase of his herbarium and library, comprising some 4,000 volumes, a million dried plant specimens, 158 botany-class drawings, and his scientific correspondence from 1810 (bound in seventy-six quarto volumes and containing about 29,000 letters from botanists the world over).

In addition to his work as a practical botanist, teacher, and administrator, Hooker’s literary output was enormous. From 1816 until 1826 he contributed most of the drawings and analyses for the new fivevolume edition of Curtis’s Flora Londinensis. From 1827 until 1845 he was wholly author and editor of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and for the first ten years its illustrator. As well as editing thirty-eight volumes of this periodical Hooker was a contributor to a number of other journals. He continued to write significant books, of which his last five, on ferns, remain standard works.

Hooker was a fellow of the Royal, Linnean, Antiquarian, and Royal Geographical societies, a corresponding member of the Académic des Sciences, a companion of the Legion of Honor, and a member of almost every European and American natural science academy. William Henry Harvey, the Irish botanist, wrote of him (in a letter to Joseph Hooker), “The great secret of his success was that he deemed nothing too small for his notice, if it illustrated any fact of science or economy, and nothing too difficult to be attempted.” And Asa Gray eulogized “the single-mindedness with which he gave himself to his scientific work, and the conscientiousness with which he lived for science while he lived by it” (American Journal of Arts and Sciences, 2nd ser., 41 , pt. 1 [1866]).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Hooker’s works include British Jungermanniae (London, 1816); Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, 5 vols. (London, 1817–1828); Musci exotici, 2 vols. (London, 1818–1820); Muscologia britannica (London, 1818–1827), written with Thomas Taylor; Botanical Illustrations (Edinburgh, 1821); Flora scotica (London, 1821); The Exotic Flora, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1822–1837); Icones filicum, 2 vols. (London, 1828–1831), written with N. K. Greville; Flora boreali americana, 2 vols. (London, 1829–1840); The British Flora (Glasgow-London, 8 eds., 1830–1860); Genera filicum (London, 1838–1840); Species filicum, 5 vols. (London, 1846–1864); Niger flora (London, 1849); A Century of Ferns (London, 1854); Filices exoticae (London, 1859); The British Ferns (London, 1861); A Second Century of Ferns (London, 1861); Garden Ferns (London, 1862); Synopsis filicum (London, 1865); and Kew Gardens, a Popular Guide (1844–1863), which went into twenty-one editions.

In addition, Hooker was wholly author of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine from 1827 to 1845. He also founded and wrote for Botanical Miscellany (1830–1833) and its continuation, Journal of Botany (1834–1842); London Journal of Botany (1842–1848); and Journal of Botany and Kew Gardens Miscellany (1849–1857), which contained many important contributions, especially on North American botany. His Icones plantarum, established in 1837, is still published at Kew.

II. Secondary Literature. On Hooker and his work see Joseph Dalton Hooker, “A Sketch of the Life and Labours of Sir William Jackson Hooker,” in Annals of Botany, 16 , no. 64 (1902), 9–221, which contains a complete chronological catalog of his works; F. O. Bower, Makers of British Botany (Cambridge, 1913) pp. 126–150, 227; J. Reynolds Green, A History of Botany in the United Kingdom (London, 1914), passim ; and Mea Allan, The Hookers of Kew (London, 1967). See also the entries under his name in Britten and Boulger, British and Irish Botanists (London, 1931); and Dictionary of National Biography.

Mea Allan