EQUIPMENT 47 
books : they are delighted we have lots of Cook's ^ and 
Weddell's.2 
As botanist [he writes in his Journal] my outfit from 
Government consisted of about twenty-five reams of paper, 
of three kinds — blotting, cartridge, and brown ; also two 
Botanising vascula and two of Mr. Ward's^ invaluable cases 
for bringing home plants aHve, through latitudes of different 
temperatures. I was further, through the kindness of my 
friends [i.e., his father], equipped with Botanical books, 
microscopes, etc., to the value of about £50, besides a few 
volumes of Natural History and general literature. 
Thus Natural History came off very badly in the matter 
of public equipment. Of this and his own work as a volunteer 
in the neglected department of marine zoology he writes seventy 
years later to Dr. Bruce of the Scotia expedition : 
It does not, I think, appear in the Narrative of the 
Voyage that I was the sole worker of the tow-net, bringing 
the captures daily to Boss, and helping him with their 
preservation, as well as drawing a great number of them 
for him. 
Except some drying paper for plants I had not a single 
instrument or book supphed to me as a naturalist — all were 
given to me by my father. I had, however, the use of Boss's 
hbrary, and you may hardly credit it, but it is a fact that 
not a single glass bottle was supphed for collecting purposes, 
^ James Cook (1728-79). His first great voj^age in the Endeavour was 
in 1768-71, when lie was accompanied by Sir Joseph Banks ; the second, in 
the Resolution and the Adventure, in 1772-5, when he was accompanied by 
a sta££ of naturalists, etc., headed by the two Forsters ; the third, in the 
Resolution and the Discovery. 
2 James Weddell (1787-1834) held the record for furthest south before 
Ross. He was a common sailor of twenty-one when in a lucky hour his bullying 
skipper handed him over to a man-of-war as a refractory subject. With 
education he became a very competent officer, but being discharged at the 
peace in 1816, took coramand of a Leith ship for a sealing voyage to the 
newly discovered S. Shetlands. He did much exploration, surveyed the 
S. Shetlands, and in February 1823, on his second voyage, reached 74° 15' S. lati- 
tude in an ice -free sea. 
» Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868), medical man and botanist, was 
the inventor, about 1827, of the Wardian case, in which growing plants can 
be transported without watering through the extremes of heat or cold. By 
its means the Chinese banana was taken from Chatsworth to the Pacific Islands ; 
20,000 tea plants were taken by Robert Fortune from Shanghai to the Hima- 
layas, and the cinchona introduced into India. 
