140 Linnean Society. [May 24, 



afterwards became assistant to a surgeon at Caernarvon ; but soon 

 quitting for a time the practice of his profession on shore, he entered 

 the navy, and became assistant-surgeon on board the Nonsuch, 

 Captain Truscott, in which vessel he was present at the famous vic- 

 tory obtained by Rodney over the Comte de Grasse on the 12th of 

 April, 1782. After the peace of that year he remained for some time 

 on the Halifax station. In 1 786 he embarked as surgeon on board the 

 Prince of Wales, a vessel fitted out by the enterprising firm of John 

 and Cadman Etches and Co., and was placed under the command 

 of Lieut, (afterwards Captain) Colnett, of the Royal Navy, for a voy- 

 age of commercial discovery to the north-west coast of America. In 

 this voyage he visited Staten Land, where he remained for some time, 

 the Sandwich Islands and China, as well as North-western America, 

 and returned from China by the direct route to England in the be- 

 ginning of 1789. In the following year he was appointed in the 

 capacity of naturalist, and with the rank of surgeon, to accompany 

 Captain Vancouver, on board the Discovery, in his celebrated voy- 

 age ; from which, after visiting King George's Sound on the south 

 coast of New Holland, a part of New Zealand, Otaheite and the 

 Sandwich Islands, and exploring by far the greater part of the north- 

 west coast of America, he returned to England in the autumn of 

 1795. During one of the visits made by this expedition to the Sand- 

 wich Islands he ascended Wha-ra-rai and Mowna-roa, two of the 

 principal mountains of the island of Owhyhee, and determined their 

 heights (that of the latter exceeding 13,000 feet) by barometrical 

 observations made simultaneously with others on board the vessel. 

 " Some account" of his ascent of the former was subsequently given 

 by him in the 1st and 2nd volumes of Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural 

 History.' From an early period of the voyage Mr. Menzies added 

 to his duties as naturalist those of surgeon of the Discovery, and it 

 affords a striking proof of his professional skill, that on so arduous 

 a service and in so protracted a voyage, not a single man was lost 

 by disease after quitting the Cape of Good Hope in their passage 

 out. 



From these various voyages Mr. Menzies brought back with him 

 to England large collections of natural history, chiefly botanical. A 

 very considerable number of the plants which he had collected, and 

 especially of the Cryptogamous, to the study of which he was always 

 devotedly attached, were new to science, and have been described 

 from his specimens by Sir James Edward Smith, Mr. Brown, Sir 

 W. J. Hooker and other botanical friends, among whom they were 

 most liberally distributed. His own publications were few in uum- 



