ABSTRACT
Joseph Banks's treatment of ethnographic collections shows that he perceived the British Museum to be an appropriate place to send material that lay outside his main concerns, rather than to retain it, thereby assembling the range of natural and artificial curiosities for which showmen like Ashton Lever and William Bullock were renowned. Banks offered large portions of the ethnographic collections he made on HMS Endeavour to the British Museum. Clear pattern was emerging in which Banks directed the 'artificial products' obtained from voyages of discovery generally towards the British Museum, while he tended to distribute the 'natural' collections of living plants and seeds to Kew Gardens, making a similar basic distinction between the two types as was applied at Soho Square. The growth of European voyaging around the globe during Banks's lifetime led to increased encounters between previously separate peoples. Inevitably, each collected from and traded with the other, and as contacts developed all were co-modified.
