Bass sent some of his botanical discoveries to Sir Joseph Banks in London. "In this voyage of fourteen weeks I collected those few plants upon Van Diemen's Land which had not been familiar to me in New South Wales," he wrote to Banks, "and have done myself the honour of submitting them to your inspection." He was made an honorary member of the Society for Promoting Natural History, which later became the Linnean Society. Some of his reports were published in the second volume of David Collins's "An Account of the English colony in New South Wales." He was one of the first to describe the Australian marsupial, the wombat.