Robert Brown

Scottish botanist

• Born: December 21, 1773; Montrose, Scotland
• Died: June 10, 1858; London, England

Nineteenth-century Scottish botanist Robert Brown collected and classified thousands of previously undocumented plant species during a government-funded scientific and geographical expedition to Australia. He made several important contributions to biology, including the discovery of the phenomenon named for him, Brownian motion.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Botany; microbiology; molecular biology

Early Life

Robert Brown was born on December 21, 1773, the second son of James Brown, an Episcopalian priest. His mother, Helen Taylor Brown, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. As a child, Brown became interested in bryophytes (mosses, hornworts, and liverworts). He received his early education at Montrose Grammar School, where his classmates included future physician and politician Joseph Hume and future historian, economist, and philosopher James Mill.

At the age of fourteen, Brown received a scholarship to study at Marischal College, a preparatory academy at the University of Aberdeen. In 1789, he transferred to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. His fascination for biology, and botany in particular, was renewed at the university. Brown was influenced by the professor of natural history John Walker, whose students had included such eminent scientists as mathematician John Playfair, botanist Sir James Edward Smith, geologist Sir James Hall, African explorer Mungo Park, and physician Robert Waring Darwin, the father of naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1790, the year before his father died, Brown published his first scientific paper for the Natural History Society. Though he did not earn a degree, he remained at Edinburgh for six years. Brown left medicine to concentrate on natural sciences and developed a strong interest in the new field of biological classification.

In 1795, he enlisted in the Fifeshire Fencibles, a unit in the Scottish defense organization known as the Home Guard. He was commissioned as an ensign and surgeon’s mate. The regiment was sent to the North of Ireland, a quiet outpost at the time, which allowed Brown ample opportunity to indulge in a favorite pastime: tramping the woods and hills to collect and study the local flora.

Life’s Work

In 1798, Brown was sent to London on a regimental recruiting mission. While in London, he met Sir Joseph Banks, a wealthy botanist and philanthropist who had sailed aboard the Endeavour with British explorer James Cook, working as a naturalist during Cook’s first voyage of discovery (1768–71). Banks, a strong advocate for the colonization of Australia (then known as New Holland), was planning a Cook-like expedition to explore the geography and biology of the southern continent. He offered Brown a handsome salary to assume the position of ship’s botanist. Brown accepted and left military service in late 1800.

By the middle of 1801, the Australian expeditionary force had been assembled and outfitted. Captain Matthew Flinders commanded the sloop HMS Investigator. Brown led the scientific contingent, which also included botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer, landscape painter William Westall, gardener Peter Good, mineralogist John Allen, and astronomer John Crosley.

The Investigator sailed south from England, stopping for excursions at Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope (where astronomer Crosley, fallen ill, left the ship) before arriving off the coast of Australia. For two solid years, Brown and crew made frequent collecting trips ashore as the ship traversed and mapped the edge of the continent.

By mid-1803, the expedition returned to Port Jackson (present-day Sydney). Many of the crew had come down with scurvy, and the leaky Investigator was deemed un-seaworthy. Captain Flinders and a skeleton crew loaded many of Brown’s duplicate botanical specimens aboard a small substitute vessel, the Porpoise, and headed for England to obtain a new ship and fresh supplies. Brown and illustrator Bauer, meanwhile, remained behind to continue their work until Flinders returned.

Flinders, however, was unlucky. The Porpoise was wrecked, Brown’s collection of plants was lost, and the surviving crew was marooned for weeks. When Flinders managed to hire a schooner to resume the voyage home, the porous boat barely managed to reach the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The French controlled the island and the Napoleonic Wars had broken out, so the British ship was seized and Flinders was imprisoned—he was not released until 1810.

Meanwhile, Brown and Bauer completed their work. They had nearly four thousand specimens—mostly unknown to science—and hundreds of illustrations in hand. They waited in vain for news of Flinders. Finally, with few other available options, they boarded the condemned Investigator and limped back to England, arriving in 1805.

Banks was pleased with Brown’s work and with the results of the expedition. In 1806, Brown was elected as librarian of the Linnean Society, a post he held until 1822, when he became a fellow of the society. He received a government salary for the five years it took him to describe and catalog the Australian specimens. In 1810—the year he was elected to the Royal Society—he published the initial volume of Introduction to the Flora of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Island, just one of many botanical publications Brown released during his lifetime.

When Banks died, he bequeathed to Brown, his friend and respected colleague, the use of his home in Soho Square and the care of his massive botanical collection (known as the Banksian Herbarium) for life. A proviso in Banks’s will stipulated that after Brown’s death the collection would be donated to the British Museum, which during the early 1800s was in the process of a major expansion, following the acquisition of many Egyptian and Greek antiquities and the personal library of English king George III.

Brown, however, used Banks’s collection to create a new opportunity for himself. In 1827, he proposed to turn over the entire Herbarium in exchange for a salaried position as keeper of the botanical department at the British Museum. His offer was accepted. Brown, who conducted considerable plant research in his new post, relinquished his Linnean librarianship (though he later served as president of the society for four years), and remained as the museum’s botanical keeper until his retirement in 1853. He died in 1858 at age eighty-four, following a severe attack of bronchitis.

Impact

Brown conducted pioneering work in taxonomy, ordering, classifying, and naming numerous Australian botanical genera. Though Brown described over 2,200 species—more than 1,700 of which were new—he particularly focused upon multiple species of Banksia (a group of spiky, nectar-rich wildflowers), Orchidaceae (the family of orchid plants) and Dryandra (shrubs and small trees considered a separate genus until incorporation into the genus Banksia in 2007). Brown named some 140 new genera, some of which, following modern techniques of examination, have been reclassified.

From his earliest days of his career, Brown was also a frequent, dedicated user of the microscope in his botanical research. Microscopes enabled Brown to view and differentiate between the reproductive systems of gymnosperms (woody, unisexual plants such as conifers, which bear naked seeds) and angiosperms (bisexual plants, such as flowers, that bear enclosed seeds within an ovary inside fruit). Magnification also allowed Brown to announce in 1813 that he had discovered the cell nucleus (which, as later research would reveal, contains most of a cell’s genetic material), and to study the phenomenon later called Brownian motion in his honor. Throughout his life, Brown collected microscopes from both domestic and foreign instrument makers, and made practical suggestions for improvements that helped advance the development of microscopy.

For his body of scientific work, Brown received the highest honor from the Royal Society, the Copley Medal, in 1839.

Bibliography

Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. New York: Norton, 2011. Print. Detailed examination of Brownian Motion and the clashing theories of two twentieth-century scientists about the character and behavior of matter on the molecular and subatomic scale.

Magee, Judith. Art and Nature: Three Centuries of Natural History Art from Around the World. Vancouver: Greystone, 2010. Print. Presents an illustrated history of natural science and geographical explorations since 1700, encompassing the results of Brown’s Australian expedition and the accompanying botanical drawings of Ferdinand Bauer.

Yoon, Carol Kaesuk. Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science. New York: Norton, 2009. Print. Presents an overview of the history and controversies involved in taxonomy (the science of organizing and classifying living organisms) since Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus founded the specialty in the eighteenth century.