The Tour in Iceland.
The tourists reached Iceland on the twenty-eighth of August. They explored the country, and saw everything notable which it contained. On the twenty-first of September they visited the most conspicuous of the geysers, or hot-springs, and spent thirteen hours in examining them. On the twenty-fourth, they explored Mount Hecla.
The most famous geyser described by Von Troil (who acted usually as penman for the party) was situate near a farm called Harkaudal, about two days’ journey from Hecla. You see, he tells us, a large expanse of fields shut in, upon one side, by lofty snow-covered mountains, far away, with their heads commonly shrouded in clouds, that occasionally sink (under the force of a prevalent wind) so as to conceal the slopes, while displaying the peaks. The peaks, at such moments, seem to spring out of the clouds themselves. On another hand, Hecla is seen, with its three ice-capped summits, and its volcanic vapours; and then, again, a ridge of stupendous rocks, at the foot of which the boiling springs gush forth, with deafening roar, and are backed by a broad marsh containing forty or fifty other springs, or ‘geysers,’ from which arise immense columns of vapour, subject of course to all the influences and lightings-up of wind and sky. Our tourists carefully watched the ‘spoutings’ of the springs—which are always fitful—and, according to their joint observations, some of these rose to the height of sixty feet. |Von Troil to Bergmann; 7 Sept., 1773. (Abridged.)| Occasionally—it has since been observed by later explorers—they reach to an elevation of more than three times that number of feet.
Nor did Mr. Banks neglect the literature of Iceland, which abounds with interest. He bought the Library of Halfdan Einarsson, the literary historian of Iceland, and made other large and choice collections. And he presented the whole to the British Museum—after bestowing, I believe, some personal study on their contents—upon his return to England at the close of the year.
Social position and influence of Sir Joseph Banks.
For many generations, it has been very conducive to the possession of social prestige in this country that a man should have acquired the reputation of an adventurous traveller. Even if the traveller shall have seen no anthropophagi, no men ‘whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,’ he is likely to attain to some degree of social eminence, merely as one who has explored those
‘Antres vast and desarts idle,’
of which home-keeping people have no knowledge, save from the tales of voyagers. To prestige of this kind, Mr. Banks added respectable scientific attainments, a large fortune, and a liberal mind. He was also the favoured possessor of graceful manners and of no mean powers of conversation. It was, therefore, quite in the ordinary course of things that his house in London should become one of the social centres of the metropolis. It became much more than that. From the days of his youth Banks had seen much of foreigners; he had mixed with men of European distinction. An extensive correspondence with the Continent became to him both a pursuit and an enjoyment, and one of its results, in course of time, was that at his house in Soho Square every eminent foreigner who came to England was sure to be seen. To another class of persons that house became scarcely less distinguished as the abode, not only of the rich Collections in natural history which their owner had gone so far to seek, and had gathered with so much toil and hardship, but of a noble Library, for the increase of which the book-shops of every great town in Europe had been explored.
The Royal Society, and its history under the rule of Sir Joseph Banks.
The possessor of such manifold distinctions and of such habits of mind seemed, to most men, marked out as the natural head of a great scientific institution. Such a man would be sure to reflect honour on the Society, as well as to derive honour from his headship. But at this particular epoch the Royal Society (then the one conspicuous scientific association in the kingdom) was much embroiled. Mr. Banks was, in many respects, just the man to assuage dissensions. But these particular dissensions were of a kind which his special devotion to natural history tended rather to aggravate than to soften.