2. Banks’ Broad Scientific Sympathies. 
This has been abundantly shown in the preceding chapter; it only 
remains for me to enumerate a few of his other activities not referred 
to therein. 
The memoranda and botanical collections of the great Linnaeus 
were offered to Banks for the sum of £1,000, but, and it seems strange 
to us, he declined to buy them, and told J. E. Smith, then a medical 
student, who was an attendant at his Thursday breakfasts, of the 
offer. Smith obtained the money from his father, and his acquisition 
of the collections and the foundation of the Linnean Society are a 
matter of historv. Banks was one of the founders of this society in 
1788 . 
Although he must have known that the transference of the Linnean 
collections to England to any ownership than his own must cause a 
rivalry with the Banksian Herbarium, Banks encouraged Smith to 
make the purchase, and never showed any jealousy in the matter, 
although he was quite aware that the Linnean herbarium in a measure 
ecUpsed his own. Jealousy seems to have been foreign to Banks’ 
nature. 
Great as his services to science are known to have been, these will never be 
fully realised till his correspondence in the British Museum and elsewhere shall 
have been thoroughly searched. That they were not confined to natural history 
is evident. He was an assiduous promoter of the Association for the Exploration 
of Tropical Africa, and it was under his auspices that Mungo Park, Clapperton, 
and others were sent out. He was one of the committee to investigate the subject 
of lightning conductors. His letters to Josiah Wedgwood show his keen apprecia- 
tion not only of the work of the great potter, but of his other ingenious contrivances ; 
among the mass of papers left by him on his death was an illustrated dissertation 
on the history and art of the manufacture of porcelain by the Chinese. He took 
a deep interest in the coinage, and was in close communication with Matthew 
Boulton on questions of minting. On applying for information on this latter 
point to Dr. Roberts-Austen, that gentleman informed the editor that, though 
not officiall}' an officer of the Mint, Banks had probably served on some depart- 
mental or Parliamentary commissions charged with mint questions; and further, 
that he had presented the mint with a really fine library, embracing all the books 
it possessed relating to numismatics and coinage questions generally, together 
with a valuable collection of coins. In reference to this the editor has also found, 
on looking over some Banksian MS. in the British Museum, that these included 
a draft code of regulations for the conduct of the officers of the Mint. 
His interest in manufactures was also constant; could his letters be brought 
together, a flood of light would thereby be thrown upon the progress of arts and 
sciences in Europe during his long teniue of the presidency of the Royal Society. 
