SIR JOSEPH BANKS.
Sir Joseph Banks: the "Father of Australia." By J. H. Maiden. (Regan Paul, Trench, and Co. Os. net.)—Mr. Maiden is Director of the Botanic Gardens at Sydney, and he does well to pay this tribute of respect and gratitude to one who certainly did good service to Australia. The immediate object of this book is to promote the erection of a statue at Botany Bay, where Banks and Cook landed on April 28th, 1770, or some other memorial. All the profits from its sale are to go to this end. We wish it all success. Banks was a wealthy man, inheriting an estate of 46,000 a year when he came of age. This did not make him indolent—all his life he was a strenuous student and explorer—but it made him careless of fame, or of the means by which fame is obtained. The journal of his Australian voyage (made in company with Cook) he handed over to Hawkesworth, who secured for himself "the major part of the kudos and the whole of the remuneration." Voyaging was a much more serious matter than it is now, and the three draughtsmen taken died in the course of it. Nor did Banks's interest in the country cease. He retained it till the end of his life. We cannot enter into the details of the volume, but we warmly commend it and the object for which it was put together to our readers.
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