Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/548

 512 BANKS'S JOURNAL. to the journal having fascinated him as a boy. Well it might ; apart from natural history the story is excidng and novel enough to fascinate boys of all ages. Admiral Wharton has given us Cook's journal of the same momentous voyage, which has had such far-reaching imperial consequences in Australia and New Zealand. It is not a little odd to read the passages dealing with these countries, and immediately afterwards the record of the landing at a part of New Guinea scarcely known to this day. The naturalist will instinctively place this volume on his shelves in the company of the Voyaye of the Beayle, Mr. Wallace's Amazons and Malay ArchipeUujo, and Sir Joseph's own Himalayan Journals. I have put these books together not as containing exploits of travel merely, but from the human interest, the brimfulness of natural curiosity they all exhibit, the companionship which is the highest and most inimitable quality of books of travel. Strange that so few travellers, other than naturalists, have ever attained it, — it is indeed the touch of nature, and no inspiration of art such as guides the romance writer to a similar success. From my knowledge of the MS. journal I can testify — though it were absurd to suppose in this case such testimony to be little better than impertinence — to the admirable editing and selection made by Sir Joseph Hooker ; but I do it for the better reason that his son, Mr. Eeginald Hooker, deserves the thanks of all who will enjoy this volume, for the assistance he rendered in the work, and in drawing up the admirable notices of the earlier voyagers and others referred to by Banks. Sir Joseph has himself given an interesting account of both Banks and Solander, of whom portraits are published. The majority of naturalists, probably nearly all of them, know little more of Banks than that he was a great patron of science, a more or less gilded personage, who had the genius to judge of men with great success, and that he had much to do with giving us Robert Brown. When they have read his Journal they will know him as a man in whom the lire of natural curiosity glowed, of indomitable courage and unfailmg resource, a man whom it was well for science that this country possessed. There are indeed passages in the MS. journal which exhibit Banks as a man of considerable humour, but these it would have been injudici- ous to publish. Though the sometime Queen of Otaheite has been dead these many years, scandal about her, as about other queens, is better buried. The ''young person" herself may read the book, with nothing worse to cause her blushes than the incidental romantic story of how Jean Bary, the servant of Commerson, naturalist to Bougainville's voyage, was discovered by the Tahitians to be a woman who had followed this young botanist to sea " in a sailor's blue array," as Mr. Gilbert describes it in another but mythical and wholesale instance of the same abandonment of feminine principles. The Journal will prove of immense interest to the anthropologist, who Will find in it abundant observation of peoples untouched by civilization, — very shrewd observation, obtained in most cases at first handj^ an^^by the method of living jntimately among the races