[2] For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.

From the age of seven, Hooker attended his father's lectures at the University of Glasgow, taking an early interest in plant distribution and the voyages of explorers like Captain James Cook.

He joined the polar explorer Captain James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition to the South Magnetic Pole after receiving a commission as Assistant-Surgeon on HMS Erebus.

On this expedition, Hooker was granted full access to the private library of Richard Clement Moody,[6] then Governor of the Falkland Islands.

They had three daughters and four sons: Frances Harriet Henslow's contribution to his work included translating French botanical texts which Hooker edited.

In 1891, Hector sent a pessimistic report on a proposed tin mine on Stewart Island, and saw Brian in 1892 and 1893, after he left his family in Australia.

He sailed on the Erebus and was assistant to Robert McCormick, who in addition to being the ship's Surgeon was instructed to collect zoological and geological specimens.

Hooker made plant collections at each location and while travelling drew these and specimens of algae and sea life pulled aboard using tow nets.

Hooker identified 18 flowering plants, 35 mosses and liverworts, 25 lichens and 51 algae, including some that were not described by surgeon William Anderson when James Cook had visited the islands in 1772.

The ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843; the voyage had been a success for Ross as it was the first to confirm the existence of the southern continent and chart much of its coastline.

An unusually protracted struggle ensued, resulting in the election of the locally born and bred botanist, John Hutton Balfour.

[23] This was just 10 days after being granted two and a half years' leave from the Geological Survey to study fossil plants in India and Borneo on behalf of Kew and the Admiralty.

However, they were released without any bloodshed and Hooker returned to Darjeeling, where he spent January and February 1850 writing his journals, replacing specimens lost during his detention and planning a journey for his last year in India.

According to an 1887 journal written by Indian administrator Richard Temple, many of the rhododendrons found in English gardens of the time were grown from seeds collected by Hooker in Sikkim.

[27] Reluctant to return to Sikkim, and unenthusiastic about travelling in Bhutan, he chose to make his last Himalayan expedition to Sylhet and the Khasi Hills in Assam.

They left Darjeeling on 1 May 1850, then sailed to the Bay of Bengal and travelled overland by elephant to the Khasi Hills and established a headquarters for their studies in Churra, where they stayed until 9 December, when they began their trip back to England.

When Hooker returned to England his father, who had been appointed director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1841, was now a prominent man of science.

William Hooker, through his connections, secured an Admiralty grant of £1000 to defray the cost of plates for his son's Botany of the Antarctic Voyages, and an annual stipend of £200 for Joseph while he worked on the flora.

[30] Hooker visited Morocco from April to June 1871, in the company of John Ball, George Maw and a young gardener from Kew, called Crump.

"[32] Hooker visited a number of cities and botanical institutions before moving west and climbing to 9,000 ft to camp at La Veta.

Hooker was instrumental in creating the device whereby the Wallace paper was accompanied by Darwin's notes and his letter to Asa Gray (showing his prior realisation of natural selection) in a presentation to the Linnean Society.

In December 1859, Hooker published the Introductory Essay to the Flora Tasmaniae, the final part of the Botany of the Antarctic Voyage.

At the historic debate on evolution held at the Oxford University Museum on 30 June 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Benjamin Brodie and Robert FitzRoy spoke against Darwin's theory, and Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley defended it.

[46][47] Hooker acted as president of the British Association at its Norwich meeting of 1868, when his address was remarkable for its championship of Darwinian theories.

In 1855 he was appointed Assistant-Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and in 1865 he succeeded his father as full Director, holding the post for twenty years.

He was the author of numerous scientific papers and monographs, and his larger books included, in addition to those already mentioned, a standard Students Flora of the British Isles and a monumental work, the Genera plantarum[48] (1860–83), based on the collections at Kew, in which he had the assistance of George Bentham.

[b] The relationship between the two men continued to deteriorate after Hooker became a supporter of Darwin's views and a member of the X-Club, who set out to get their way with the Royal Society.

What can be more humiliating than two years of wrangling with such a creature!Finally, Hooker asked to be put in communication with Gladstone's private secretary, Algernon West.

Nonetheless, the report was amongst the papers laid before Parliament, and it contained an attack on both the Hookers, and suggested (amongst much else) that they had mismanaged the care of their trees, and that their systematic approach to botany was nothing more than "attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds".

[57] The outcome was not a vote in the Commons, but a kind of truce until, in August 1874, Gladstone transferred Ayrton from the Board of Works to the office of Judge Advocate-General, just before his government fell.