Ch.u>. in.] the Dogma of Constancy of Specks. 139 



If the principles of comparative morphology laid down by 

 De Candolle were at first prevented from being rapidly dis- 

 seminated in Germany by the philosophical tendencies then 

 reigning among its botanists, and especially by the obscurities 

 of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, yet these principles and 

 his views also on the natural system won their way by degrees 

 to acknowledgment and acceptance; and after the year 1830 

 the study of the system was prosecuted by the botanists of 

 Germany, as w T ell as by those of England and France, as the 

 proper object of the science. We may even say that the 

 impulse given by De Candolle worked more powerfully from 

 that time forward in Germany than in France. It may be said 

 too of De Candolle's contemporary, the Englishman Robert 

 Brown 1 (1 773-1858), whose chief labours fall in the period 

 between 1820 and 1840, that he, like De Candolle, was better 



1 Robert Brown was the son of a Protestant minister of Montrose, and 

 studied medicine first at Aberdeen and afterwards at Edinburgh; he then 

 became a surgeon in the army, and was at first stationed in the north 

 of Ireland. When the Admiralty despatched a scientific expedition to 

 Australia under Captain Flinders in 1S01, he was appointed naturalist 

 to the expedition on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, F. Bauer 

 being associated with him as botanical draughtsman, Good as gardener, 

 Westall as landscape-painter; one of the midshipmen of the vessel was 

 John Franklin. In consequence of the unseaworthiness of the ship 

 Flinders left Australia, intending to return with a better one, but was ship- 

 wrecked on the voyage and detained by the French at Port Louis as 

 a prisoner of war till 1810. The naturalists of the expedition remained 

 in Australia till 1805, when Brown returned to England with 4,000 for 

 the most part new species of plants. Sir J. Banks appointed him his 

 librarian and keeper of his collections in 1810; he was also Librarian to the 

 Linnaean Society of London. In 1823 he received the bequest of Banks' 

 library and collections, which were to be transferred after his death to 

 the British Museum ; but by his own wish they were deposited there 

 at once, and he himself received the appointment of Custodian of the 

 Museum and remained in that position till his death. At Humboldt's 

 suggestion Sir Robert Peel's Ministry granted him a yearly pension of 

 £200. His merits were universally acknowledged, and Humboldt even 

 named him * botanicorum facile princeps.' 



