LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. XXvil 



Immediately on his arrival in England, he was appointed Librarian 

 of the Liunean Society, of which he had been elected an Associate 

 in 1798. During his voyage he had been indefatigable in de- 

 scribing with the minutest accuracy the whole of the materials 

 which he had collected, and in the accumulation of a vast store of 

 facts and observations in relation to their structure and affinities, 

 as well as to aU the most important points in the anatomy and 

 physiology of plants in general. The new \dews which were thus 

 opened to him on a multitude of botanical subjects, he was en- 

 abled, by his position at the Linnean Society, and by the free and 

 unrestricted access which Avas Kberally accorded to him to the 

 treasures of the Banksian Library and Herbarium, to enlarge and 

 to perfect, and to lay them before the world in a series of masterly 

 publications, which at once stamped upon him the character of the 

 greatest and most philosophical botanist that England had ever 

 produced. In 1810 appeared the first volume of his ' Prodromus 

 Florae Novae HoUandiae et Insulae Yan Diemen,' which was re- 

 ceived by aU the more profound botanists of this country and of 

 the continent as the work of a mind thoroughly imbued with the 

 principles of the Natural System, and giving to that system, which 

 had hitherto found little favour out of France, a wider and a firmer 

 basis. This important work, together with his Memoirs on Pro- 

 teacece and Asclepiadece, which immediately followed, and his * Ge- 

 neral Remarks, Greographical and Systematical, on the Botany of 

 Terra Australis,' appended to the ' Narrative of Captain Flinders's 

 Voyage,' published in 1814, by displaying in the most instructive 

 form the superior advantages of the Natural System, whether in 

 the monographic description of separate families, or in the com- 

 parison of the families with each other and with the entire mass 

 of vegetation, gave new life to that system, and speedily led to its 

 universal adoption. A series of Memoirs followed, chiefly in the 

 Transactions of the Linnean Society, or in the appendices to vari- 

 ous books of travel and survey, which gave fuUer and more com- 

 plete development to his views on almost every department of 

 botanical science, and induced the illustrious Humboldt not only 

 to confer upon him the title of " Botanicorum facile Princeps," 

 but also to salute him with the more comprehensive and expressive 

 designation conveyed in the dedication of the ' Synopsis Plan- 

 tarum Orbis Novi,' "Roberto Brownio, Britanniarum Glorije 

 atque Ornamento, totam Botanices Scientiam ingenio mirifico 

 complectcnti." At the close of the year 1810, on the death of his 

 old and intimate friend, the laborious, accurate and learned Dry- 



