ABSTRACT
The equipping of the Investigator, and the instructions to the commander and scientific staff, manifest an empirical strain which was a strong component of eighteenth-century English science. Despite the intuitive and synthetic elements in Newton's discoveries, he had made some methodological contribution by his acceptance that science should be established on the basis of facts derived from close observation and experimental verification. Nevertheless, the indirect impact of 'pure' science on technology, and in the instance on the techniques of exploration, is equally important, for the empirical processes which were vital to eighteenth-century science were just as valuable to the craft of seamanship. All European countries with Asian or American empires attempted the interchange of tropical plants to their dominions, the French being particularly active. In many senses Banks was a conservative figure; nowhere more clearly perhaps than in his attitudes to trade and empire.
