For a man of his distinction the dignities which were conferred upon him by royal favour seem disproportionate. He was created a Baronet in 1781, a Knight of the Bath in 1795, and two years subsequently was sworn of the Privy Council. In 1802 he was chosen one of the eight foreign members of the French Académie des Sciences, in Paris.
To the last his house, library, and museum were open to all scientific men, of whatever nationality, and the services of his successive librarians, Solander, Dryander, and Brown, cannot be over-estimated. His Thursday breakfasts and Sunday soirées in Soho Square made his house the centre of influential gatherings of an informal kind; curiosities of every description were brought by visitors and exhibited, and each new subject, book, drawing, animal, plant, or mineral, each invention of art or science, was sure to find its way to Sir Joseph's house. It was at one of these parties that he strongly recommended the acquisition of the Linnean Library and collections to James Edward Smith, a young Norwich physician, and an ardent botanist. This was the turning-point of Smith's life, and led to the foundation of the Linnean Society, which held its meetings for many years, during the lifetime of Robert Brown, in Banks's house in Soho Square, where the Linnean collections were placed previous to the Society's removal to apartments provided by Government in Burlington House.
Sir Joseph Banks became latterly a great martyr to the gout, "which grew to such an intensity as to deprive him entirely of the power of walking, and for fourteen or fifteen years previous to his death, he lost the use of his lower limbs so completely as to oblige him to be carried, or wheeled, as the case might require, by his servants in a chair: in this way he was conveyed to the more dignified chair of the Royal Society, and also to the [Royal Society] Club—the former of which he very rarely omitted to attend, and not often the latter; he sat apparently so much at his ease, both at the Society and in the Club, and conducted the business of the meetings with so much spirit and dignity,
