To Sir JOSEPH BANKS, Bart. 

 Prefident of the Royal Society. 

 S I R, 



THE rare and excellent example you 

 have given, fo honourable to faience, 

 by foregoing the more brilliant advantages of 

 birth and fortune, to feek for knowledge 

 through difficulties and dangers, at a period 

 of life when the allurements of pleafure are 

 leaft refiftable, and in an age when the ge- 

 neral effeminacy of manners feemed beyond 

 that of former times to difcourage every vir- 

 tuous exertion, juftly entitles you to the 

 preeminence you enjoy in the philofophical 

 world. In your extenlive purfuits after na- 

 tural knowledge, Botany has been difting- 

 uifhed by your peculiar attention ; of this, 



the 



