BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES 
SIR JOSEPH BANKS! 
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 Royal 
Society, than to the prominent part he took in the voyage 
of H.M.S. Hndeavour 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 1743 (0..). He was the son of William Banks 
(sometime Sheriff of Lincolnshire and M.P. for Peterborough), 
of Revesby 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, 
