Book reviews: The enlightening of science

Abstract

John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture . Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+324, 111., £35.00. ISBN 0521-45077-2 Anyone familiar with the Royal Society’s portrait of Sir Joseph Banks will readily believe that he dominated a large segment of English ‘useful knowledge and polite culture’ between his return from the glamorous voyage with Cook to the South Seas and Australia in 1771 and his death in 1820. Very rich, an intimate of George III, and, after one battle in 1783-4, an autocratic President of the Royal Society, he acted as patron, research director and employer to a multitude of botanists, natural historians, proto-anthropologists, agriculturalists and ‘improvers’. In this work, based upon John Gascoigne’s mastery of the epistolary material in the Banks Archive (now in the British Museum of Natural History awaiting complete transcription and publication), together with much printed material, Banks is given his due place in English culture. The author clearly shows that Banks, while not much of a scientist himself, greatly helped to develop much interesting, useful and progressive knowledge about the world and man.