[xxv] 



BROWN'S COLLECTING METHODS AND HERBARIUM 



Robert Brown was on close terms of friendship with William Jack- 

 son Hooker, and when the latter's twenty-one-year-old son, Joseph 

 Dalton Hooker (1817 — 1911) was making ready in 1839 to go as na- 

 turalist on the Antarctic expedition of H. M. S. Erebus and Terror under 

 James Clark Ross, he naturally asked Brown's advice. The expedition 

 sailed in September 1839 and returned to England in September 1843. 

 In 1890 Sir Joseph recalled Brown's account of the methods he had 

 used on Flinders's voyage: 'When preparing myself for a similar voyage 

 to that he had undertaken, he gave me much information respecting 

 his own sea-life, together with invaluable 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 herbarium of the plants he had examined in a fresh state that 

 he was enabled to employ his time on shipboard in systematically 

 describing the materials for his 'Prodromus' *** When in Australia 

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

 nor of Tasmania, who was a midshipman under Flinders in the Tn- 

 vestigator', and who became Brown's life-long friend. He told me of 

 Brown's extraordinary industry and powers of application, whether 

 when cribbed, cabined, and confined within the lurching and rolling 

 wooden walls of a sloop 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 publication of the Australian Flora; the species were, 

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

 the descriptions were written out in the homeward voyage, and it only 

 remained on the return to England to complete the work' (Hooker, 

 1890). 



Brown's wisdom in dividing his collections became evident when 

 the Porpoise returning to England with the best set aboard was wrecked 

 in 1803. Referring to this disaster in a letter to Banks, Brown wrote: 

 T possess duplicates of almost all the specimens, yet those sent were 

 far the best, belonging to the South Coast, and in consequence the most 

 valuable that have been collected during the voyage/ 



On the death of Jonas Dryander in 1810, Banks appointed Brown 



