Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/37

Rh stantly occupied in making drawings of Australian and other plants, keeping him in liberal pay, and leaving him a legacy in his will.

He was the first to bring indiarubber into notice, and early advocated the cultivation of tea in India. He established botanic gardens in Jamaica, St. Vincent, and Ceylon, besides giving invaluable support to Colonel Kyd in the foundation of the garden at Sibpur, near Calcutta.

He was a keen agriculturist, and amongst his very few published writings one is on Blight Mildew and Rust, another on the introduction of the Potato, and a third on the Apple Aphis. The Horticultural Society was founded in 1804, and Banks is named as one of the persons to whom the Charter was granted in 1809. The esteem in which he was held by this Society is shown by their electing him an honorary member, and by their instituting, after his death, a Banksian medal.

Services of an international character were rendered by him when, in the course of war, the collections of foreign naturalists had been captured by British vessels; on no less than eleven occasions were they restored to their former owners through the direct intervention of Banks with the Lords of the Admiralty and Treasury. The disinterestedness of such a course will be at once understood when it is remembered that these collections, some of them of inestimable value (now at the Jardin des Plantes at Paris), would otherwise have contributed to the aggrandisement of his own magnificent museum. "He even sent as far as the Cape of Good Hope to procure some chests belonging to Humboldt; and it is well known that his active exertions liberated many scientific men from foreign prisons. He used great exertions to mitigate the captivity of the unfortunate Flinders, and it was principally by his intercession that our Government issued orders in favour of La Perouse" (Weld's History of the Royal Society).

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 thor-