Joseph Hooker Married the Widow of Sir William Jardine

Sir William Jardine

In 1876 Joseph Hooker married Hyacinth Jardine, formerly Symonds, the widow of Sir William Jardine.

What is notable about this is that in the story of the discovery of natural selection is that Joseph Hooker was Darwin's best friend and Hooker's father - William Hooker - was Alfred Wallace's mentor and correspondent pre-1858.  And it was William Jardine - a great friend of Selby - who obtained from Scotland, at Selby''s request, a copy of Patrick Matthew's 1831 book, which contained the full prior published hypothesis of natural selection. Selby cited Matthew's book many time in 1842 (see Sutton 2014a; Sutton 2014b) and then went on to be editor of Wallace's (1855) Sarawak paper on organic evolution. Notably, Darwin's great friend Jenyns and Darwin's father were guests at Selby's house pre-1858.  Jenyns (1885) went on to write a book about Selby.

Interestingly, William Jardine wrote a savage review of Darwin's Origin of Species in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1860). A copy of it is here. In his review Jardine - in as 19th century gentlemanly way as possible - points out Darwin's obvious plagiarism: "Many of the facts are second-hand, and without authority given."

Clearly more research is needed into the relationships pre-1858 between the Hookers of Kew and William Jardine.

Post Sutton (2016) Further Newly discovered routes of potential pre-1858 knowledge contamination of Matthew's original ideas to Darwin and Wallace. 

1. William Jardine made the acquaintance of William Hooker (father of Darwin's best friend Joseph Hooker) in 1847 (see page 24 of Jackson).

The Patrick Matthew Puzzle

Until the publication of Nullius (Sutton 2014), it was universally proclaimed as a science "knowledge claim" that no naturalist /no one at all read Patrick Matthew's (1831) prior publication of the full hypothesis of macro evolution by natural selection before Darwin and Wallace (1858) and Darwin (1859) replicated it and, to excuse themselves for not citing Matthew, claimed to have done so independently of Matthew or anyone else.

In reality, Big Data analysis newly revealed in 2014 that Matthew's orignal ideas were read by at least 25 individuals, because they cited it in the published literature! Moreover, 19 of those who read it were in Darwin's inner social circle! Of the seven naturalists now newly known to have cited Matthew's book in print pre-1858, three played pivotal roles at the epicentre of Darwin's and Wallace’s published and unpublished work on natural selection before the ‘Origin of Species’ was first published in 1859.

In the picture below are some of the seven citing naturalists. Pictured are John Loudon, - Prideaux John Selby, - Robert Chambers and William Jameson of the East India Company.

The Patrick Matthew Puzzle question is: "Why is the extremely famous and influential naturalist Sir William Jardine also featured in this picture?"

Four of the Citing Seven Naturalists and Sir William Jardine.
Why is Jardine in this picture?