The diary which Mr.--afterwards Sir Joseph--Banks kept on this voyage, between August, 1768, and July, 1771, is almost as interesting and remarkable as the diary kept on H.M.S. _Beagle_ by his greater successor in the same studies, Charles Darwin. This journal of Sir Joseph Banks really served to give the substance of greatest interest to the volumes published on the First Voyage of Cook, which were edited by Dr. Hawksworth; and although Hawksworth in his introduction laid stress on the important part played in the narrative by the incorporation of Banks's journals (most generously placed at his disposal), nevertheless the mass of the reading public has been too apt to ascribe to Captain James Cook observations and descriptions which were entirely the work of Banks. Though Cook's mighty achievements as a navigator, and as one who laid the foundations of the British Empire in Australasia and British Columbia, can never be lessened by the results of any research into the history of his voyages, it is only fair to point out that the records of his first great adventure would not have achieved their world-wide popularity but for Banks's co-operation and his munificent expenditure on the expedition. Banks, in fact, was a man born out of due time. His was a nineteenth-century mind which made its appearance in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as Shakespeare was an intelligence of the twentieth century which made its appearance three hundred years before its appropriate period. In order not to interrupt the course of the narrative it might be as well to give in a footnote final information as to Sir Joseph Banks's career.[71]