LTNKEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 57 



believe, to voracity, whilst his wonderful memory enabled him 

 to retain, and his methodical faculties to classify, all he had 

 acquired. Of that memory and of his readiness in utilizing 

 it I had, thanks to his kindness, much experience. He seemed to 

 me never to forget a plant that presented auy feature of interest, 

 if he had but once seen it, and he could single out the specimen 

 that he had examined from a sheet full of duplicates. It was the 

 same with books ; those of the old authors especially, as Ray, 

 Linnaeus, Euraph, and Rheede, were all familiar to him, and he 

 could often turn to a volume, and sometimes to a page, for a 

 statement or figure without the aid of a reference. Thus at 

 the age of 28, when he sailed for Australia, it was as an accom- 

 plished botanist, but it remained to be seen how far he was con- 

 stitutionally fitted for the duties of a naturalist-voyager; and this 

 he proved to be in every way. When preparing myself for a 

 similar voyage to that he had undertaken, he gave me much 

 information respecting his own sea-life, together with invalu- 

 able advice. Above all things he told me not only to collect 

 assiduously and in duplicate, but to make notes and observations 

 on the living plant, and an accessible classified herbarium of small 

 specimens of every species collected, stowing away the duplicates 

 in empty rum- casks, headed up, where they should be safe from 

 damp, rats, and insects. It was to this practice of reserving a 

 working herbai'ium of the plants he had examined in a fresh 

 state that he was enabled to employ his time on shipboard in syste- 

 matically describing the materials for the ' Prodromus.' 



During the voyage of the ' Investigator' he suffered little from 

 seasickness, and had the services of a most accomplished botanical 

 draftsman, Ferdinand Bauer (who made drawings of 1200 species 

 of plants, most of them with exquisite analyses), of a gardener, and 

 of a personal servant. These advantages would have availed 

 little without Brown's unflagging industry. When in Australia 

 I had the privilege of seeing much of Sir John Franklin, then 

 Grovernor of Tasmania, who was a midshipman under Flinders in 

 the ' Investigator,' and who became Brown's life-long friend. He 

 told me of Brown's extraordinary industry and powers of appli- 

 cation, whether when cribbed, cabined, and confined within the 

 lurching and rolling wooden walls of a slooj) of 350 tons, or 

 collecting under the tropical sun of the hottest regions in the 

 world. And herein is the secret of the preparation and pub- 

 lication of the Australian Flora ; the species were, m great 

 measure at any rate, described as collected in Australia itself, 

 the descriptions were written out in the homew^ard voyage, and 

 it only remained on the return to England to complete the work. 



I have dwelt at greatest length upon the ' Prodromus,' although 

 it was far from being the most far-reaching outcome of Brown's 

 scientific labours. It was certainly the largest in various ways ; 

 it shows him as the "all round " botanist *, student, voyager, 



* Von Martins says of him in his eloge that he was as a botanist both peri- 

 patetic and anaporetic, as great in the field as in the closet. 



