ABSTRACT
It is written that about the middle of the eighteenth century, shortly after the invention, or discovery, in 1746 of the Leyden jar, the Abbé Nollet, a French physicist of some eminence, was commanded to demonstrate the wonder to the king. He did so by giving an electric shock to 180 of the royal guards at once. Thinking then of fresh fields to conquer, he collected together the Carthusian monks in the Grand Convent of Paris and arranged them in a line a mile long, ensured that all had a grip on the interconnecting wires, made his final connection with his charged jars, and a mile of monks leapt simultaneously into the air, to the great pleasure of the assembled city. This may be called the lighter side, the badinage, of science; and I mention it not because it casts any piercing light either on science or on voyages of discovery, but because the ingenious abbé had a pale counterpart in one well-known to the scientific history of our own country, the young Joseph Banks. When the Endeavour sailed from England in 1768 she carried not merely Banks but Banks's electrical machine, the handiwork of Jesse Ramsden, one of the great instrument makers of the time, and another machine belonging to John Green the astronomer; and the gentlemen of the great cabin amused themselves a few times by giving one another shocks, with no very outstanding results. It was perhaps their lack of consistent success that deterred them from operating on the inhabitants of Tahiti and New Zealand; for one of the diversions of Banks's visit to Iceland later on was to administer the machine to the surprised Icelanders. Or perhaps they were simply too busy in other ways. There were shocks and surprises enough anyhow for the Polynesians in the arrival of this expedition; and we may say that the first onset of European science in the Pacific was not one of physics, and did not lie in experiment, but was a matter of observation, and collection and description. This is not altogether true, for some of the observations were physical observations, as we shall see; but the great triumphs did not lie in this sphere. Nor did they lie in the spheres in which the really great triumphs of eighteenth century science lay, if we are to believe the scientific historians.
