Feature Biography
Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820)
Joseph Banks (1743–1820), botanist and administrator-entrepreneur-patron of the sciences, grew up at his family’s extensive estate in Lincolnshire. Educated at Harrow, Eton and Oxford, he did not take a degree, preferring private tutoring in botany to the traditional education in the classics. While botany was the focus of his most intense scientific activities, Banks was neither an important botanical theorist nor a prominent taxonomist. Rather, botany was his stimulus for the larger scientific...