results of the historic Endeavour voyage with all its previously unknown specimens
required an equally great publication for the benefit of the learned world. What Banks
had in mind was a truly heroic publication, a massive Florilegium with no fewer than
743 plates based on Parkinson’s finished drawings, with a large amount of descriptive
text, in a format that was 18 inches by 12 inches and would require multiple volumes.
By December 1772 his collections were unpacked, prepared and arranged at his
house, including the species that had never been seen in Europe before. This was
not a contribution to science as we would expect today, but a gentleman’s private
collection, for Banks had funded the botanical part of the expedition himself and his
collection was now the greatest ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in the world. To be ushered into
his herbarium was a special privilege and we have the Reverend William Sheffield’s
description of his visit published in Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne:
The number of plants is about 3000, 110 of which are new genera, and 1300 new species
which were never seen or heard of before in Europe. What raptures must they have felt to
land upon countries where everything was new to them! whole forests of not yet described
trees clothed with the most beautiful flowers and foliage, and these too inhabited by several
curious species of birds equally strangers to them ... Add to these the choicest collection of
drawings in Natural History that perhaps ever enriched any cabinet, public or private:- 987
plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them
a flower, a leaf, and a portion of the stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number
of other drawings of animals, birds, fish, etc. And what is more extraordinary still, all of
the new genera and species contained in this vast collection are accurately described, the
descriptions fairly transcribed and fit to be put to the press.Any botanist visiting London would want to go to Banks’ house in New Burlington
Street – later to be exchanged for a grander house at 32 Soho Square – to see his
expansive private collection. Interestingly, the specimens of the gum trees were not
named by Banks or Solander but by the French botanist Charles Louis L’Héritier
de Brutelle who liked trees because ‘they are the part that is most neglected by all
botanists’. It was David Nelson who collected a eucalypt on Bruny Island, southern
Tasmania, in 1777 on Cook’s third expedition. This specimen was taken to the British
Museum, where L’Héritier was able to examine the smooth egg-shaped casing around
the developing eucalyptus flower buds. Rather than Latin he thought of the Greek
word eu meaning well, and klyptus meaning covered, and since the leaves were
quite assymetrical this suggested obliqua, so he established a new genus by calling it
Eucalyptus
obliqua, this name was first published in 1788 and long after the return of
Banks and the Endeavour.
Joseph Banks continued to have many other interests. In 1778 he was elected50 Where Australia Collides with Asia
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