If the principles of comparative morphology laid down by De Candolle were at first prevented from being rapidly disseminated in Germany by the philosophical tendencies then reigning among its botanists, and especially by the obscurities of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, yet these principles and his views also on the natural system won their way by degrees to acknowledgment and acceptance; and after the year 1830 the study of the system was prosecuted by the botanists of Germany, as well as by those of England and France, as the proper object of the science. We may even say that the impulse given by De Candolle worked more powerfully from that time forward in Germany than in France. It may be said too of De Candolle's contemporary, the Englishman Robert Brown[1] (1773-1858), whose chief labours fall in the period between 1820 and 1840, that he, like De Candolle, was better
- ↑ Robert Brown was the son of a Protestant minister of Montrose, and studied medicine first at Aberdeen and afterwards in Edinburgh; he then became a surgeon in the army, and was at first stationed in the north of Ireland. When the Admiralty despatched a scientific expedition to Australia under Captain Flinders in 1801, he was appointed naturalist to the expedition on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, F. Bauer being associated with him as botanical draughtsman, Good as gardener, Westall as landscape-painter; one of the midshipmen of the vessel was John Franklin. In consequence of the unseaworthiness of the ship Flinders left Australia, intending to return with a better one, but was shipwrecked on the voyage and detained by the French at Port Louis as a prisoner of war till 1810. The naturalists of the expedition remained in Australia till 1805, when Brown returned to England with 4000 for the most part new species of plants. Sir J. Banks appointed him his librarian and keeper of his collections in 1810; he was also Librarian to the Linnaean Society of London. In 1823 he received the bequest of Banks' library and collections, which were to be transferred after his death to the British Museum; but by his own wish they were deposited there at once, and he himself received the appointment of Custodian of the Museum and remained in that position till his death. At Humboldt's suggestion Sir Robert Peel's Ministry granted him a yearly pension of £200. His merits were universally acknowledged, and Humboldt even named him 'botanicorum facile princeps.'
