ROBERT BROWN 89 



general account of the botany of the AustraHan continent 

 and compared the flora with that of South Africa, South 

 America, and other regions of the Southern Hemisphere, 

 and thus laid the foundations of botanical geography, a 

 subject destined to develop so markedly in the hands of 

 Sir Joseph Hooker a generation afterwards. 



About the same time Brown began the series of publi- 

 cations on special genera and groups for which he is most 

 famous, and the first of these was a monograph on the 

 characteristically AustraHan family of the Proteaceae. 

 It has often been pointed out by his biographers and critics 

 that Brown had a curious habit of hiding away some of his 

 most important morphological and anatomical discoveries 

 in the body of an otherwise purely descriptive or taxo- 

 nomic paper. This monograph on the Proteaceae is a 

 case in point. After a full account of the genera and 

 species of the order, with remarks on their affinities and 

 geographical distribution, he quite incidentally enlarges 

 on the structure of the seed in general, and elucidates in a 

 sentence the morphological nature of the seed reserves. 

 " The albumen of the seed," he says, " is merely that 

 condensed portion of the Uquor amnios which remains 

 unabsorbed by the embryo ; and as this fluid is in the 

 early stage never wanting, all seeds may in one sense be 

 said to have albumen ; but while in some tribes this 

 unabsorbed part in the ripe seed many times exceeds the 

 size of the embryo, so there are others in which not a 

 vestige of it remains.'* It seems to me that this brief 

 statement of the relations of the endosperm to the embryo 

 gives a clearer exposition of the events taking place in the 

 process of seed development and maturation than is to 

 be found in very many of the botanical textbooks in use 

 at the present moment. In this paper also Brown goes 

 minutely into the structure of the pollen grains in the 

 Proteaceae and their adaptations to the morphological 

 features of the stigma. 



The Prodromus also contains valuable morphological 



