Discovery Ships Erebus and Terror in the years 1839–1843, under the Command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross, is a description of the many plants discovered on the Ross expedition, which visited islands off the coast of the Antarctic continent, with a summary of the expedition itself, written by the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker and published in parts between 1844 and 1859 by Reeve Brothers in London.

[2] The Flora of Tasmania contains an introductory essay on biogeography written from a Darwinian point of view, making the book the first case study for the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Hooker gave Darwin a copy of the work, which proposed that plant groups on different landmasses had common ancestors, spreading via long-vanished land bridges.

On 12 May the ships anchored at Christmas Harbour for two and a half months, during which all plants previously encountered by James Cook on the Kerguelen Islands were collected.

In the Flora Atlantica, Hooker praises the work of the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks and his Swedish assistant, Daniel Solander, on Captain Cook's first voyage in 1769.

[4] The first flora for New Zealand was Achille Richard's 1832 Essai d'une flore de la Nouvelle-Zélande,[5] based on d'Urville's work and such earlier data as existed.

His father, William Jackson Hooker, was the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the United Kingdom's centre for the study of plant species.

[8] Hooker subsequently made voyages to regions around the world including the Himalayas and India in 1847–1851, Palestine in 1860, Morocco in 1871, and the Western United States in 1877, collecting plants and writing monographs on his findings in each case.

[6][9] These helped him to build a high scientific reputation, and in 1855 he became Assistant-Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; he became full Director in 1865, remaining so for 20 years.

Thus for instance Ranunculus pinguis is described as acaulis, carnosus, pilosus, ... ('unstalked, fleshy, hairy, ...'); the a and β varieties living in Lord Auckland's group of islands, in "boggy places on the hills, alt.

The Latin is tersely botanical, confining itself to anatomical features; the English discussion is more wide-ranging, with comments such as "A very handsome species, and quite distinct from any with which I am acquainted."

On the Auckland Islands wood grows near the sea and consists of the tree Metrosideros umbellata intermixed with woody Dracophyllum, Coprosma, Hebe (assigned to Veronica by Hooker) and Panax.

An exemplary difference is the dominance of Asteraceae in New Zealand's islands, and absence of representatives of the Rubiaceae, while the reverse is true for those two plant families on the other Antarctic archipelagos.

The flora proper begins with a short introduction explaining the book's approach; as with the other volumes, the bulk of the text is a systematic account of the families and species found by the expedition.

Hooker dedicated this Part to the local Tasmanian naturalists Ronald Campbell Gunn and William Archer, noting that "This Flora of Tasmania .. owes so much to their indefatigable exertions".

While he asserted that "my own views on the subjects of the variability of existing species" remain "unaltered from those which I maintained in the 'Flora of New Zealand'", the Flora Tasmaniae is written from a Darwinian perspective that effectively assumes natural selection, or as Hooker named it, the "variation" theory, to be correct.

[22] In 1868, the botanist Robert Oliver Cunningham described the Flora as "invaluable" for his study of the plants of "Fuegia" from the survey ship HMS Nassau.

For example, in 2013 W. H. Walton in his Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent describes it as "a major reference to this day", encompassing as it does "all the plants he found both in the Antarctic and on the sub-Antarctic islands", surviving better than Ross's deep-sea soundings which were made with "inadequate equipment".

[24] David Senchina notes that Hooker was the first botanist to set foot on Antarctica, in 1840; the first sighting of a plant on the continent was only a few years earlier, namely A.