Joseph Hooker: the making of a botanist.

Joseph Hooker became one of the most influential botanists of his day. He is best remembered as a friend of Charles Darwin and an early advocate of natural selection. However, after returning to Britain from his first major voyage, Hooker spent years struggling to find a paid position that would allow him to pursue his studies of plant classification and distribution. As he worked to establish himself, he also helped transform the status of botany as a discipline. In all his efforts, Hooker relied on a network of unpaid, colonial collectors, whose often-forgotten contributions to Victorian natural history are vital to the understanding of the professionalization of the sciences in the 19th century.