Page:EB1911 - Volume 13.djvu/691

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HOOKER, T.—HOOKER, SIR W. J.
  


and gradually modified its constitution. One of the corollaries of his principles is his theory of the relation of church and state, according to which, with the qualifications implied in his theory of government, he asserts the royal supremacy in matters of religion, and identifies the church and commonwealth as but different aspects of the same government.

Bibliography.—A life of Hooker by Dr Gauden was published in his edition of Hooker’s works (London, 1662). To correct the errors in this life Walton wrote another, which was published in the 2nd edition of Hooker’s works in 1666. The standard modern edition of Hooker’s works is that by Keble, which first appeared in 1836, and has since been several times reprinted (1888 edition, revised by Dean Church and Bishop Paget). The first book of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was edited for the Clarendon Press by Dean R. W. Church (1868–1876).  (T. F. H.) 


HOOKER, THOMAS (1586–1647), New England theologian, was born, probably on the 7th of July 1586, at Marfield, in the parish of Tilton, County of Leicester, England. He graduated B.A. in 1608 and M.A. in 1611 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the intellectual centre of Puritanism, remained there as a fellow for a few years, and then preached in the parish of Esher in Surrey. About 1626 he became lecturer to the church of St Mary at Chelmsford, Essex, delivering on market days and Sunday afternoons evangelical addresses which were notable for their moral fervour. In 1629 Archbishop Laud took measures to suppress church lectureships, which were an innovation of Puritanism. Hooker was placed under bond and retired to Little Baddow, 4 m. from Chelmsford. In 1630 he was cited to appear before the Court of High Commission, but he forfeited his bond and fled to Holland, whence in 1633 he emigrated to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in America, and became pastor at Newtowne (now Cambridge), Mass., of a company of Puritans who had arrived from England in the previous year and in expectation of his joining them were called “Mr Hooker’s Company.” Hooker seems to have been a leader in the formation of that sentiment of discontent with the Massachusetts government which resulted in the founding of Connecticut. He publicly criticized the limitation of suffrage to church members, and, according to a contemporary historian, William Hubbard (General History of New England), “after Mr Hooker’s coming over it was observed that many of the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.” He was a leader of the emigrants who in 1636 founded Hartford, Connecticut. In a sermon before the Connecticut General Court of 1638, he declared that “the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance” and that “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them.” Though this theory was in advance of the age, Hooker had no idea of the separation of church and state—“the privilege of election, which belongs to the people,” he said, must be exercised “according to the blessed will and law of God.” He also defended the right of magistrates to convene synods, and in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639), which he probably framed, the union of church and state is presupposed. Hooker was pastor of the Hartford church until his death on the 7th of July 1647. He was active in the negotiations which preceded the formation of the New England Confederation in 1643. In the same year he attended the meeting of Puritan ministers at Boston, whose object was to defend Congregationalism, and he wrote a Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648) in justification of the New England church system. His other works deal chiefly with the experimental phases of religion, especially the experience precedent to conversion. In The Soule’s Humiliation (1637), he assigns as a test of conversion a willingness of the convert to be damned if that be God’s will, thus anticipating the doctrine of Samuel Hopkins in the following century.

See George L. Walker’s Thomas Hooker (New York, 1891); the appendix of which contains a bibliography of Hooker’s published works.


HOOKER, SIR WILLIAM JACKSON (1785–1865), English botanist, was born at Norwich on the 6th of July 1785. His father, Joseph Hooker of Exeter, a member of the same family as the celebrated Richard Hooker, devoted much of his time to the study of German literature and the cultivation of curious plants. The son was educated at the high school of Norwich, on leaving which his independent means enabled him to travel and to take up as a recreation the study of natural history, especially ornithology and entomology. He subsequently confined his attention to botany, on the recommendation of Sir James E. Smith, whom he had consulted respecting a rare moss. His first botanical expedition was made in Iceland, in the summer of 1809, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks; but the natural history specimens which he collected, with his notes and drawings, were lost on the homeward voyage through the burning of the ship, and the young botanist himself had a narrow escape with his life. A good memory, however, aided him to publish an account of the island, and of its inhabitants and flora (Tour in Iceland, 1809), privately circulated in 1811, and reprinted in 1813. In 1810–1811 he made extensive preparations, and sacrifices which proved financially serious, with a view to accompany Sir R. Brownrigg to Ceylon, but the disturbed state of the island led to the abandonment of the projected expedition. In 1814 he spent nine months in botanizing excursions in France, Switzerland and northern Italy, and in the following year he married the eldest daughter of Mr Dawson Turner, banker, of Yarmouth. Settling at Halesworth, Suffolk, he devoted himself to the formation of his herbarium, which became of world-wide renown among botanists. In 1816 appeared the British Jungermanniae, his first scientific work, which was succeeded by a new edition of William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, for which he wrote the descriptions (1817–1828); by a description of the Plantae cryptogamicae of A. von Humboldt and A. Bonpland; by the Muscologia Britannica, a very complete account of the mosses of Great Britain and Ireland, prepared in conjunction with Dr T. Taylor (1818); and by his Musci exotici (2 vols., 1818–1820), devoted to new foreign mosses and other cryptogamic plants. In 1820 he accepted the regius professorship of botany in Glasgow University where he soon became popular as a lecturer, his style being both clear and ready. The following year he brought out the Flora Scotica, in which the natural method of arrangement of British plants was given with the artificial. Subsequently he prepared or edited many works, the more important being the following:—

Botanical Illustrations (1822); Exotic Flora, indicating such of the specimens as are deserving cultivation (3 vols., 1822–1827); Account of Sabine’s Arctic Plants (1824); Catalogue of Plants in the Glasgow Botanic Garden (1825); the Botany of Parry’s Third Voyage (1826); The Botanical Magazine (38 vols., 1827–1865); Icones Filicum, in concert with Dr R. K. Greville (2 vols., 1829–1831); British Flora, of which several editions appeared, undertaken with Dr G. A. W. Arnott, &c. (1830); British Flora Cryptogamia (1833); Characters of Genera from the British Flora (1830); Flora Boreali-Americana (2 vols., 1840), being the botany of British North America collected in Sir J. Franklin’s voyage; The Journal of Botany (4 vols., 1830–1842); Companion to the Botanical Magazine (2 vols., 1835–1836); Icones plantarum (10 vols., 1837–1854); the Botany of Beechey’s Voyage to the Pacific and Behring’s Straits (with Dr Arnott, 1841); the Genera Filicum (1842), from the original coloured drawings of F. Bauer, with additions and descriptive letterpress; The London Journal of Botany (7 vols., 1842–1848); Notes on the Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of the Erebus and Terror (1843); Species filicum (5 vols., 1846–1864), the standard work on this subject; A Century of Orchideae (1846); Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany (9 vols., 1849–1857); Niger Flora (1849); Victoria Regia (1851); Museums of Economic Botany at Kew (1855); Filices exoticae (1857–1859); The British Ferns (1861–1862); A Century of Ferns (1854); A Second Century of Ferns (1860–1861).

It was mainly by Hooker’s exertions that botanists were appointed to the government expeditions. While his works were in progress his herbarium received large and valuable additions from all parts of the globe, and his position as a botanist was thus vastly improved. He was made a knight of Hanover in 1836 and in 1841 he was appointed director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, on the resignation of W. T. Aiton. Under his direction the gardens expanded from 11 to 75 acres, with an arboretum of 270 acres, many new glass-houses were erected, and a museum of economic botany was established. He was engaged on the Synopsis filicum with J. G. Baker