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VII. Biographical Memoir of the late Right Hon. Sir Joseph 

 Banks, Bart. G.C.B. President of the Royal Society, 



feiR Joseph Banks is said to have been descended from a noble 

 Swedish family ; but, whatever truth there maybe in this assertion, 

 it is certain that he did not trace his pedigree higher than the 

 reign of Edward the Third, when his ancestor, Simon Banke, 



married the daughter and heir of Caterton, of Newton in 



Yorkshire. By this marriage, the manor of Newton, in the wa- 

 pentake of Staincliffe, came to the family of Banke, with whom 

 it remained until it was sold in the middlp of the seventeenth 

 century. 



From this Simon Banke, Sir Joseph was the eighteenth in lineal 

 descent. His grandfather, Joseph Banks, Esq. was High She- 

 riff of Lincolnshire in the year 1736, and some time Member 

 of Parliament for Peterborough. He possessed an ample fortune, 

 which was inherited by the subject of this memoir. 



Sir Joseph was born December Yd, 1743. After a suitable 

 preparatory education, he was sent to study at the University of 

 Oxford, in every branch of liberal knowledge, he made great 

 proficiency: natural history in particular engaged his fondest 

 attachment, and at a very early age he conceived an ardent 

 ambition to promote this great science, by those eminent exer- 

 tions of which genius, fortune, and industry alone are capable. 



At the time when Sir Joseph Banks began to cultivate the 

 study of natural history, it was beginning to emerge from that 

 neglect into which the exclusive pursuit of natural philosophy 

 had, for the last hundred years, thrown it. Linnaeus had pro- 

 duced for it an arrangement, and a nomenclature; and his pu- 

 pils were travelling as naturalists, into every region of the earth, 

 with an ardour not less zealous and intrepid than if they had 

 gone to propagate a new religion, or to rifle the treasures of Mexi- 

 can, monarchs. In France, Buffon was beginning to render the 

 study of natural history fashionable. In England, collections 

 had been formed, which were eagerly consulted by every man of 

 science, and praised with a warmth that might well encourage 

 voung men of fortune to seek the same approbation by the same 

 means. The curiosity of naturalists was turned towards the new 

 world, as containing ample treasures much less known, and more 

 peculiar, than those which remained to be explored in the old. 



To go the narrow round of the common fashionable tour, could 

 appear but miserable trifling to a young man whose mind glowed 

 with a love of scientific enterprise, and of the knowledge of na- 

 ture. But to explore scenes unknown, and contemplate the 

 beauty and majesty of nature where they had not yet been vio- 

 lated 



