BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCHES 



SIK JOSEPH BANKS 1 



THE name of Sir Joseph Banks is pre-eminent amongst the 

 many distinguished scientific men who adorned the long 

 reign of George the Third, and his career practically coincides 

 with the reign of that monarch, closing in the same year. 

 The hold he has always had on popular estimation is per- 

 haps less due to his high position in the royal favour, or 

 his long tenancy of the presidential chair of the Eoyal 

 Society, than to the prominent part he took in the voyage 

 of H.M.S. Endeavour under Lieutenant Cook, and his con- 

 tributions to Hawkesworth's account of it. Cook's story is 

 that of a sailor, and his account of his discoveries is rendered 

 more attractive by the introduction of passages from the 

 more graphic pages of Banks's Diary : it is these passages 

 which attracted so much attention in the narrative drawn 

 up by Dr. Hawkesworth. Cook's own Journal, recently 

 published by Admiral Wharton, shows this very clearly, and 

 the naturalist's own record of their discoveries and adven- 

 tures is now for the first time given to the public. 



Joseph Banks was born in Argyle Street, London, on 

 2nd February 1*743 (o.s.). He was the son of William Banks 

 (sometime Sheriff of Lincolnshire and M.P. for Peterborough), 

 of Eevesby Abbey, Lincolnshire, a gentleman of some fortune, 

 due to his father's successful practice of medicine in that 



1 No adequate Life of Sir Joseph Banks having as yet appeared, the com- 

 piler of the following notes is indebted mainly for his information to Weld's 

 History of the Royal Society, Sir John Barrow's Sketches of the Royal Society 

 and the Royal Society Club, to Mr. B. Daydon Jackson's article on Banks in 

 the Dictionary of National Biography, and to scattered incidental notices. 



