A Letter of Sir Joseph Banks Describing the Life of Daniel Solander

Abstract

O NE OF THE foremost clhampions of science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society of London from 1778 to 1820. Born in London in 1743, Banks was the son of William Banks of Revesby Abbey, Lincolnshire. At the age of thirteen, after receiving his early instruction from a tutor, Banks entered Eton College. Here he developed an interest in natural history. In 1761 the future President of the Royal Society entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he found botanical teaching so moribund that he had to seek instruction at Cambridge from the young son of a Jewish watchmaker; at neither university could he get the instruction he wanted from the professor of botany! Shortly after leaving Oxford in 1764, Banks began his Wanderjahre. In 1766 he went to Newfoundland. Two years later, in August 1768, Banks, Daniel Carl Solander, and their eight assistants and servants joined Captain James Cook in his first exploration of the South Sea, returning to England in July 1771. In 1772 Joseph Banks, again with Solander, went to Iceland. In 1778 Banks became President of the Royal Society,1 and as such he dominated English science for the next forty-two years, justly earning the title the Autocrat of the Philosophers. 2 Because Sir Joseph published very little, his article about Daniel Solander, Banks's librarian as well as traveling companion, printed in an eighteenthcentury Swedish journal, is worthy of note. Solander's renown, however, is not based solely on his relationship to Banks. Born in Sweden, Solander was one of the best students of Carl Linnaeus; he was also a curator at the British Museum and did scientific work for John Ellis 3 and Gustav Brander 4