346 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



Besolution on its return, writes to Banks (August 14tb, 1775) : 

 •' I was told that Mr. Anderson, one of the surgeon's mates, has 

 made a good botanical collection, but I did not see him." This 

 letter and that which precedes it contain much of interest ; 

 they are in vol. i of the transcription of Banks's correspondence 

 in the Department of Botany. 



In the winter preceding the third voyage '■' Anderson was in 

 London, where he made the acquaintance of Sir John Pringle, then 

 President of the Eoyal Society, and communicated to him notes 

 he had taken during the second voyage " of the cases of some of 

 our ship's company, wiio, on our late voyage to the South Sea, 

 had experienced the bad effects of eating certain fish of a poisonous 

 nature." These notes, taken in July, 1774, "on board His 

 Majesty's ship the Resolution, off the Island Mahcolo, in the 

 South Sea," are published in Phil. Trans. Ixvi, 544-552 ; they are 

 dated: ''Besolution, Deptford, April 23, 1776," at which time 

 the ship, to which he was attached, was in the river, laying in 

 stores, ammunition, etc. From the note which introduces them 

 we learn that x\nderson had been " favoured by Mr. Banks with 

 a sight of his dr i vings," w^hich enabled him to identify the fish as 

 Sparus Pagrus L. In a later volume of the Transactions (Ixviii, 

 102) we find Anderson at the Cape, writing to Pringle under date 

 November 24th, 1776, " an Account ^of a large Stone near Cape 

 Town" which he had been taken to see by Francis Masson, 

 whose acquaintance he had there made— probably through 

 Pringle, through whose good offices Masson had been sent to the 

 Cape (see Journ. Bot. 1884, 115-6). 



On the same day Anderson w^rote a long letter to Banks, of 

 which there is a transcript in the Banksian correspondence at 

 Kew. In this he speaks of the arrival of the Discovery with 

 " a person in her who understands Botany" who " will be able to 

 procure you every new article in that branch, a task which I have 

 not vanity enough to suppose myself equal to ; but shall never- 

 theless continue to collect whatever presents itself, lest any 

 accident should happen either to him or to the ship. We 

 carried him w^ith us to the country, but unluckily at the 

 time few plants were in flower ; yet when such things offer I 

 think his diligence will let few of them escape." This "person" 

 was doubtless David Nelson, of whom some particulars will be 

 given later. Anderson proceeds to give a short account of the 

 voyage out. At Teneriffe, " in the valley which I ascended and 

 on the sides of the hills not a plant was to be seen but the 

 Euphorbia canariensis, which grows in vast quantities. It is 



* Webber, the " professed and skilled artist " who was engaged by Cook 

 to accompany him, and from whose drawings the plates accompanying the 

 account of the voyage were taken, seems to liave been subsequently employed 

 by Banks. In the collection of Masson's drawings are two by him — one is 

 labelled by Dryander, " W'ebber, copied from a drawing of Captain Gordon's 

 at the Cape of Good Hope" {^Pachypodiinn namaqnannm) ; the other, an 

 incomplete one of Stopelia {Hoodia) Gordoni, is merely labelled "Webber," 

 but was doubtless also a copy, probably also from Gordon, of whom an account 

 will be found in Journ. Bot. 1914, 75, 224. 



