STUDIES ON GYMNOSPERMS 117 



importance than the advance of knowledge by the scientific and 

 scholarly solution of a problem. Such was not Brown's view, 

 and he practised wise delay in publication nonumque prematur 

 in annum, a maxim so strongly advocated by the Latin poet, 

 was really put into practice by him as it also was by some of his 

 contemporaries. Dryander, Solander and others have left, as 

 Brown has done, rich stores of MS. behind them, which have 

 never passed through the press. 



The habit of long and continuous reflection on fundamental 

 problems, which was so marked a feature of Brown's character, 

 was perhaps responsible for the curious manner in which some 

 of his most valuable and suggestive contributions to science, and 

 especially to morphology, were given to the world, a habit to 

 which I have already adverted. 



We know he had been for many years interested in the ovule, 

 and he made a number of important discoveries respecting it. 

 Closely bound up with this topic were his studies on the Cycads 

 and Conifers. He observed the plurality of embryos in the seeds 

 of these plants, and, indeed, makes a reference to the phenomenon 

 of polyembryony in the Prodromus, in which, as in most of his 

 systematic works, morphological observations of the highest 

 value are scattered, though embodied in very compressed 

 phrases, amongst the descriptions of species. But every now 

 and then when writing on one subject he seems to be carried 

 away with the rush of his ideas on general questions. Thus in 

 a memoir on the genus Kingia he entitles the paper, possibly to 

 save his face after he had written it, " Character and Description 

 of Kingia ; a new genus of plants found on the south-west coast 

 of New Holland. With observations on the Structure of its 

 unimpregnated Ovulum, and on the female flower of Cycadeae 

 and Coniferae." 



This paper is, perhaps, one of the most important of his 

 works, for it was there that, having briefly dismissed the genus 

 Kingia, he " let himself go " on the ovule, and then in a masterly 

 dissertation, puts forward his view on the gymnospermic nature 

 of the Cycads and Conifers. 



He summarises what was known at that time as to the 

 structure of the ovule, acutely criticising the views of the various 



