BANKSIA

(In honour of Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., the great patron of natural history, and one of the companions of Captain Cook in his second voyage.) A genus of Proteaceous plants forming a conspicuous feature in the landscape of Australia, where the species are called by the colonists wild honeysuckle, and reckoned a sign of bad land. They have flowers and fruit growing in close hard downy or woolly cones, and hard broad leaves on branches so close and rigid that the traveller, it is said, may literally walk without inconvenience upon the top of a wood formed of these trees. [s. 142]