as been thoroughly successful,
{115b} and no aspect of Sir Joseph's life is neglected, the whole being
admirably arranged and annotated, and treated throughout with conspicuous
judgment and skill.

In an "autobiographical fragment" (i., p. 3) Sir Joseph records that he
was born at Halesworth in Suffolk, "being the second child of William
Jackson Hooker and Maria Turner." He was not only the son of an eminent
botanist, but fate went so far as to give him a botanical godfather in
the person of Rev. J. Dalton, "a student of carices and mosses and
discoverer of _Scheuchzeria_ in England." It was after Mr Dalton that
Hooker was named, his first name, Joseph, commemorating his grandfather
Hooker. In 1821 the family moved to Glasgow, where Sir William Hooker
was appointed Professor of Botany. It was here that Sir Joseph, at the
age of five or six, showed his innate love of plants, for he records
{116}:--

"When I was still in petticoats, I was found grubbing in a wall in the
dirty suburbs of the dirty city of Glasgow, and . . . when asked what I
was about, I cried out that I had found _Bryum argenteum_ (which it was
not), a very pretty little moss which I had seen in my father's
collection, and to which I had taken a great fancy."

While still a child his father used to take him on excursions in the
Highlands, and on one occasion, on returning home, Joseph built up a heap
of stones to represent a mountain and "stuck upon it specimens of the
mosses I had collected on it, at heights relative to those at which I had
gathered them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany."

Sir Joseph records that his father gave him a scrap of a moss gathered by
Mungo Park when almost at the point of death. It excited in him a desire
of entering Africa by Morocco, and crossing the greater Atlas. That
childish dream, he says, "I never lost; I nursed it till, half a century
afterwards, . . . I did (with my friend Mr Ball, who is here by me, and
another friend Mr G. Maw) ascend to the summit of the previously
unconquered Atlas."

In 1820 William Hooker was appointed to the newly founded Professorship
of Botany at Glasgow. Of this his son Joseph writes, "It was a bold
venture for my father to undertake so responsible an office, for he had
never lectured, or even attended a course of lectures." With wonderful
energy he "published in time for use in his second course, the _Flora
Scotica_ in two volumes." Sir Joseph's mother