230 .PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



Brown's able hands as it were the vegetation of a new world, as rich 

 as it was peculiar, — just at the time, too, when the immortal work of 

 Jussieu had begun to be appreciated, and the European and other 

 ordinary forms of vegetation had begun to be understood in their 

 natural relations. The new, various, and singular types which render 

 the botany of New Holland so unlike all other, Mr. Brown had to 

 compare among themselves, — to unravel their intricacies with scarcely 

 a clew to guide hini, except that which his own genius enabled him to 

 construct in the process of the research, — and to bring them harmo- 

 niously into the general system of botanical natural alliance as then 

 understood, and as he was himself enabled to ascertain and display it. 

 It was the wonderful sagacity and insight which he evinced in these 

 investigations, which, soon after his return from Austraha, revealed the 

 master mind in botanical science, and erelong gave him the position 

 of almost unchallenged eminence, which he retained, as if without 

 effort, for more than half a century. 



The common observer must wonder at this general recognition, 

 during an era of great names and unequalled activity, of a claim so 

 rarely, and as it were so reluctantly, asserted. For brief and com- 

 paratively few — alas ! how much fewer than they should have been ! — 

 are Mr. Brown's publications. Much the largest of them is the Pro- 

 dromus of the Flora of New Holland, issued fifty years ago, which 

 begins upon the one hundred and forty-fifth page, and which stopped 

 short at the end of the first volume. The others are special papers, 

 mostly of small bulk, devoted to the consideration of a particular plant, 

 or a particular group or small collection of plants. But their simple 

 titles seldom foreshow the full import of their contents. Brown de- 

 lighted to rise from a special case to high and wide generalizations ; and 

 was apt to draw most important and always irresistible conclusions from 

 some small, selected data, or particular point of structure, which to 

 ordinary apprehension would ajipear wholly inadequate to the purpose. 

 He had unequalled skill in finding decisive instances. So all his 

 discoveries, so simply and quietly announced, and all his notes and 

 observations, sedulously reduced to the briefest expression, are fertile 

 far beyond the reader's expectation. Cautious to excess, never sug- 

 gesting a theory until he had thoroughly weighed all the available 

 objections to it, and never propounding a view which he did not know 

 how to prove, perhaps no naturalist ever taught so much in writing 



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