XX INTRODUCTION. 



celebrity, studies, and labours of some eminent individual amongst their subjects ; 

 and they have thus been induced to cast an eye of favour upon them; their own 

 thoughts and time are necessarily too much absorbed by politics, and the higher 

 duties of their station, or office, to allow them much leisure to direct and em- 

 ploy them elsewhere, unless some such stimulus awakens their attention to the 

 subject, its merits, and claims to notice. 



It was by his ardent zeal in the cause he had embraced ; and the mighty power 

 of his intellect ; and his indefatigable labours and studies ; and his profound 

 knowledge of his subject for the time ; and the wide celebrity of his name, that the 

 Aristotle of the North, the illustrious Linne, attracted to himself, and the science 

 that he loved, the favourable regards, and the effectual aid of the higher powers ; 

 in consequence of which, under their auspices, eminent naturalists were sent out 

 to explore various and distant regions, for the purpose of discovering, studying in 

 their native soil, and collecting, their natural productions. Thus it was that Kalm 

 went out to North America ; Tornstroem and Osbeck to China ; Forskahl to 

 Arabia ; Thunberg to Japan ; Sparrman to China and the Cape ; Hasselquist to 

 the Levant, Palestine, and Egypt ; and others to various other regions of the globe. 



In our own country, till within a few years, the collection of natural productions 

 made no part of the official duty of those employed by government in exploring 

 unknown, or little known, countries ; and if such collection was made in any expe- 

 dition undertaken by authority, it was solely owing to the taste and inclination of 

 some individual connected with it. It was thus that the late Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph 

 Banks, led by the love of science alone, and his own native ardour in her cause, at 

 first distinguished himself; a circumstance that became the stepping-stone which 

 originally placed him upon the eminence in the scientific world which from that 

 time he held, and which caused him, in the event, to be looked up to by those 

 in power, and enrolled him in the list of his Majesty's Most Honorable Privy 

 Councillors. Accompanying Capt. Cook, the most illustrious of our circumnavi- 

 gators, in his first voyage, with the aid of his zealous and learned friend the late 



