Hocken. — Earliest Literature relating to N.Z. 629 



facit per alium facit per se. And so it was with Stanfield 

 Parkinson. Yet posterity, whilst condemning the method, 

 must congratulate itself on the possession of such valuable 

 results. If Solander, Banks, and Cook had published each 

 his own separate account there would have been no pla- 

 giarism and we should have been all the richer. To the 

 " Characteres Generum Plantarum," published in 1776 and 

 dedicated to the King, we are indebted for the first contribu- 

 tions to our New Zealand and South Sea Island botany ; the 

 plates are exceedingly primitive, especially those in the Ger- 

 man edition published three years later when father and son 

 had shaken the English dust from their feet. Their name 

 remains with us in Forstera, a genus of New Zealand alpine 

 plants. In 1786 appeared a " Dissertatio inauguralis Botanico- 

 medica de Plantis esculentis Insularum Oceani Australis." 

 This is of eighty pages octavo, and is of considerable interest. 

 It would be tiresome to particularize many other products 

 of their pen, which were chiefly pamphlets of a disputatious 

 kind and an outcome of the treatment they had received. 



I do not here more than refer to the astronomical treatises 

 of Charles Green, William Wales, and William Baily of the 

 two voyages ; nor to the work of Dr. Andrew Sparrman, 

 who joined the expedition at the Cape of Good Hope as an 

 assistant to Dr. Forster. 



Nor on this occasion did Cook's enemies omit to launch 

 their shafts of ridicule. A volume appeared with this odd title : 

 " The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, Esquire, into Carno- 

 virria, Taupiniera, Olfactaria, and Auditante, in New-Zealand ; 

 in the Island of Bonhommica, and in the powerful Kingdom 

 of Luxovolupto on the Great Southern Continent. Written by 

 himself; who went ashore in the 'Adventure's' large Cutter, at 

 Queen Charlotte's Sound, New Zealand, the fatal 17th of De- 

 cember, 1773, and escaped being cut off and devoured, with the 

 rest of the Boat's crew, by happening to be a-shooting in the 

 woods ; where he was afterwards unfortunately left behind by 

 the ' Adventure.' ' This very rare book is written somewhat 

 after the manner of "Gulliver's Travels," and is full of con- 

 cealed raillery, apparently directed against Cook, Banks, and 

 Solander, whose adventures are travestied. In one of the illus- 

 trations two men are represented walking on the pavement, 

 whilst a third, apparently Cook, is floating in the air in the 

 arms of a flying female, whose hair is dressed in extraordinary 

 fashion. It is difficult to suggest the writer of this skit : 

 perhaps it was Dalryinple, who to his dying day never forgot 

 to sneer at Cook, — or perhaps the celebrated Dr. Horsley, who 

 had no more affection for Banks. 



The third voyage — from which, alas ! Cook was not des- 

 tined to return — had for its object the discovery of a north- 



