SIR JOSEPH BANKS’ JOURNAL. 
Journal | of | The Right Hon. | Sir Joseph Banks | Bart., K.B., 
P.R.S., | during Captain Cook's first voyage in H.M.S. | Endeavour in 
1768-71 to Terra del Fuego, | Otahite, New Zealand, Australia, | the Dutch 
East Indies, | etc. | Edited by | Sir Joseph D. | Hooker | With [2] portraits 
and [5] charts | London | Macmillan and Co., Ltd. | | 1896 | All 
rights reserved [8vo, cloth, pp. lii. +468; Cash Price in Great Britain a 
net}. 
Thisfine—nay more, fascinating—-work calls for a longer notice 
than we, on several accounts, can give it; yet, for one reason, 
a Roe reference it deserves and must have. Although born 
in ‘London town,’ Sir Joseph Banks was by parentage and 
territorial connexions a native of ‘level Lincolnshire ’—that 
‘county of broad acres’ second only to York, that land of the 
Coritani whose morasses and felled firwoods stayed at last 
Ceesar’s advancing legions. And not only, too, as a ‘patron’ 
of science in general, in those ‘long days’ when George the 
Third was King, but as a botanist and zoologist whose in- 
wild-life known as East an est Fen—a land of lakes like 
unto the Nile delta to-day—have become ‘classic 
remain to us now as pictures of his word-painting only: a con- 
dition of nature not simply deeply-interesting to the naturalist, 
but a knowledge of which (as with the ‘Lincoln Gap’) is 
essential to any right understanding of the flora, fauna, topo- 
graphy, and zoography of these later days. The book itself 
does not record these contributions to east-country natural 
history, for it deals with Banks’ voyage with Yorkshireman 
Cook to Otahite, the Land of Fire, and the Dutch Indies, and 
as such calls for no detailed comment from us; but it is the 
learned yet very human Author of the Journal that we have to 
thank Sir Joseph Hooker, as editor, for once again bringing to 
our mind in such a way as to render Banks an imperishable and 
abidingly-pleasant memory. As with Darwin, so with Banks— 
the training of a long sea-voyage and daily journalising even- 
tuated in a method and increasing precision of observation that, 
Darwin may have had the finer natural ability, but Banks 
laboured (at least) under the disadvantage of living a hundred 
years before him, when the appliances and adjuncts of investiga- 
tion had reached no high degree of perfection. Franklin, Parry 
oe Nansen, Jackson, are other parallels ; Scientia especially rises 
‘on stepping-stones’ of its dead self to loftier peaks. . That. = 
March x 1898, ey 
