Joseph Dalton Hooker

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an English botanist and explorer and a close friend of Charles Darwin. The son of the botanist William Jackson Hooker, he trained as a doctor and sailed with James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition of 1839 to 1843. He explored the Himalaya from 1847 to 1851, as described in his Himalayan Journals, and later traveled in Morocco and the American West. In 1858 he helped arrange the joint presentation of Darwin's and Wallace's papers on natural selection. He succeeded his father as director of Kew Gardens in 1865 and, with George Bentham, compiled the Genera Plantarum.