10.
summaries of Thunberg,[1] and joined them together (II, vi, 83-84) and since he was also careless, spoke of all the plants as belonging to Nagasaki and its vicinity, whereas both Thunberg and Hildreth had specifically mentioned two groups, one of plants belonging to Nagasaki and its environs, and the other of plants around the Hakone mountains.
Cornwallis' predatory excursions into past accounts of Japan took him finally to the English translation of Captain Golovnin's exciting memoirs of a long captivity on the island of Yezo between 1811 and 1813. The third edition of Golovnin's work had appeared in 1852.[2] Portions of it were used by Hildreth, but a description of the Japanese language as given by Golovnin is not to be found in Hildreth, and it seems reasonable to assume that Cornwallis appropriated the passage directly from Golovnin.[3]
The plagiarism laid at Cornwallis' door by the first reviewers of his book is therefore more than proved. Few of the reviewers knew enough about Japan to contradict, even if they wished to, the material there presented as fact. But most of them ageed on "the flashy and exaggerated rhetoric of the author's style, or rather of his mind." One of them asserted that the smartness of Cornwallis' style was of the kind that
