PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS—SECTION D. 91 
With Robert Brown’s participation in the work of elucidating 
the flora, knowledge proceeded by leaps and bounds. He entered 
upon his Australian work with a preliminary critical knowledge 
of about 1000 Australian species of plants contained in the 
Banksian Herbarium. He spent about four years in Australia. 
His collections amounted to 3900 species (including 300 from 
Timor), and as the result of Caley’s collecting, the total number 
of species at his command was raised to 4200, “The species 
were in great measure, at any rate, described as collected in 
Australia itself, the descriptions were written out on the home 
ward voyage, and it only remained on the return to England to 
complete the work” (/). His first published contribution to- 
wards a knowledge of the Australian flora was his masterly 
monograph, “On the Proteacee of Jussieu,” read before the 
Linnean Society in January, 1809 (Trans. Vol. x., pp. 15-226, 
1810). Herein the author described or redescribed twenty-three 
Australian genera, and 204 Australian species, the majority of 
them brought to light by his own collecting, in addition to a 
large number of genera and species from the Cape. He dis- 
cusses history, and generalises respecting the geographical dis- 
tribution, the morphology, and the affinities of the order ; and he 
groups the species of the large genera into sub-divisions by 
morphological characters. In 1810 the “Prodromus Flore 
Novee Hollandiz” made its appearance. In this the natural 
system of Jussieu was applied to the classification of the Austra- 
lian flora, and 464 genera and more than 2000 species are 
treated of. In 1814 appeared Flinders’s “ Voyage,” to which 
Robert Brown contributed an appendix, giving a general sketch 
of the natural orders included in the Australian flora. In the 
year 1849 he contributed the Botanical Appendix to Sturt’s 
“ Expedition into Central Australia,” in which he estimates that 
the number of known Australian species was about 7000. In 
looking at Robert Brown’s work, oné cannot but be impressed 
with his broad views, with the high plane and the large scale 
on which he worked, not less than with the general excellence 
of his work. It is with something like a shock that one turns 
to the painfully synthetic attempts of his zoological contem- 
poraries to build up a reference collection, and a knowledge of 
Australian marsupials—a group as characteristic as the 
Proteacee, and with less than one-fifth the number of species. 
The number of Proteads enumerated in Dryander’s “ Chloris” 
is nine genera, and about forty-five species. In Baron yon 
Mueller’s “Second Census” (1889), the number of species is 
given as 597. Robert Brown’s “Supplementum Primum Pro- 
dromi” was published in 1830. This is an octavo pamphlet of 
35 pages, devoted entirely to Australian Proteads, chiefly from 
® Sir J. D. Hooker’s ‘‘ Eulogium on Robert Brown,’’ Proc. Linn. Soc., Session 1887-88, 
/p. 57. 
