398 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



A walk up 

 the hills. 



sociologist, 



became "Toote," Solander "Torana," Banks "Tapane"; 

 and they drank the health of King George under the name 

 of " Kilnargo." With their new friends the English 

 kept perpetual holiday. Even their one fault added 

 to gaiety. They were thieves, but they were thieves 

 of a genius that turned thieving into miracle. If ever 

 a man slept with one eye open, that man was Cook ; yet 

 they stole his stockings, he says, " from under my head, 

 and yet I .am certain I was not asleep the whole time." 

 Banks was chief thief-catcher ; and very seriously and 

 very happily he played the game ; " away we set at 

 full cry, much like a pack of fox-hounds ; we ran and walked 

 and walked and ran for, I believe, six miles " ; to find 

 that, very early in the chase, the criminal had turned aside 

 to take a quiet bath in a brook. 



But Banks was a man of science as well as a man of 

 pleasure. His special interest was Botany. But nothing 

 done by men, animals, fishes, or plants was alien to his 

 mind. With infinite vigour and with infinite happiness 

 he studied Nature in all its forms. In company with 

 Monkhouse fat Solander this time wisely left behind 

 he had a long day's walk inland, past the hill slopes planted 

 with bread-fruit trees, past the last of the houses, whose 

 owners refreshed them with cocoa-nuts, up among steep 

 rocks and cascades, where long strips of bark served as 

 ropes by which to scramble from ledge to ledge, though, 

 even on the ledges, none but goats or Indians could stand. 

 For minerals Banks looked in vain. But he observed 

 that " the stones everywhere showed manifest signs of 

 having been at some time or other burnt." His conjecture 

 was that the island owed its origin to a volcano now extinct. 

 And, for the comfort of the " theoretic writers," whose 

 theories Cook had already in part demolished, Banks 

 suggests that their " necessary continent may have been 

 sunk by dreadful earthquakes and volcanoes two or three 

 thousand fathoms under the sea, the tops of the mountains 

 only remaining above the water in the shape of islands." 



As a sociologist, his methods of study were equally 

 thorough. The only way to get understanding of native 



