SIR JOSEPH BANKS XXXV 
For a man of his distinction the dignities which were 
conferred upon him by royal favour seem disproportionate. 
He was created a Baronet in 1781, a Knight of the Bath 
in 1795, and two years subsequently was sworn of the 
Privy Council. In 1802 he was chosen one of the eight 
foreign members of the French Académie des Sciences, in 
Paris. 
To the last his house, library, and museum were open 
to all scientific men, of whatever nationality, and the ser- 
vices of his successive librarians, Solander, Dryander, and 
Brown, cannot be over-estimated. His Thursday breakfasts 
and Sunday soirées in Soho Square made his house the centre 
of influential gatherings of an informal kind; curiosities 
of every description were brought by visitors and exhibited, 
and each new subject, book, drawing, animal, plant, or 
mineral, each invention of art or science, was sure to find 
its way to Sir Joseph’s house. It was at one of these 
parties that he strongly recommended the acquisition of the 
Linnean Library and collections to James Edward Smith, 
a young Norwich physician, and an ardent botanist. This 
was the turning-point of Smith’s life, and led to the founda- 
tion of the Linnean Society, which held its meetings for 
many years, during the lifetime of Robert Brown, in Banks’s 
house in Soho Square, where the Linnean collections were 
placed previous to the Society's removal to apartments 
provided by Government in Burlington House. 
Sir Joseph Banks became latterly a great martyr to the 
gout, “which grew to such an intensity as to deprive him 
entirely of the power of walking, and for fourteen or fifteen 
years previous to his death, he lost the use of his lower 
limbs so completely as to oblige him to be carried, or 
wheeled, as the case might require, by his servants in a 
chair: in this way he was conveyed to the more dignified 
chair of the Royal Society, and also to the [Royal Society] 
Club—the former of which he very rarely omitted to attend, 
and not often the latter; he sat apparently so much at his 
ease, both at the Society and in the Club, and conducted the 
business of the meetings with so much spirit and dignity, 
