BROWN, ROBERT. — Botanist, born at Montrose in Scotland in 1773, died in London in 1858, the son of a Protestant bishop. He attended Rutherford’s lectures in Edinburgh. He was appointed assistant surgeon in a garrison regiment in northern Ireland, where he remained until the end of 1800, also devoting himself to botanical studies. Around this time he met Giuseppe Banks (born in 1743, died in 1820), another illustrious English naturalist, who had taken part in several voyages, including that of Cook’s first expedition around the world (1768–71), from which he had brought back notable collections. B.
Through Banks’s influence, he was sent in 1802 with an English expedition to explore the coasts of Australia. There he examined the flora of New South Wales, Tasmania, the islands of the Bass district, etc.; in 1805 he returned to England with a collection of 4,000 plant species.
Immediately afterward he was appointed librarian of the Linnean Society. He reported his observations in the Pradromus florae Novae Hollandiae (1810), in the General remarks geographical and systematical on the botany of Terra australis (1814), and in the Supplementum primum florae Novae Hollandiae. He also described the plants collected in Java by Horsefield, in Abyssinia by Slate, and the collections gathered by Houdney, Clapperton, Captain Takey, and finally those of Ross, Parry, and Richardson, explorers of the Arctic regions. He further published numerous memoirs on the pollen and fertilization of orchids and asclepiads, on the fertilization and development of the pollen and ovules of conifers and cycads, on floral morphology, and on other subjects in anatomy and physiology. He discovered the nucleus in plant cells; in 1827 he was the first to observe under the microscope that characteristic movement of a purely physical nature which, in his honor, was later called Brownian motion. This movement can be observed with the ultramicroscope in a colloidal solution, and is due to the reciprocal impacts of the molecules of the dispersoid upon those of the dispersed phase, but also, under the microscope, upon larger particles.
B. was appointed a member of the Royal Society of London in 1811. He came into possession of Banks’s library and herbarium in 1823. He donated the collection of plants to the British Museum, which appointed him director of the botanical section in 1827. In 1832 he received the degree of doctor from the University of Oxford, and the following year he became a member of the Academy of Sciences of Paris.
Humboldt rightly named him “Prince of Botanists.”