94 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



this and other theories I must refer you to works on 

 physical chemistry. 



You will now, I hope, have begun to appreciate how 

 much botany owes to Robert Brown's investigations. 

 In almost every department of the science he left his 

 mark, and if he did not himself promulgate a complete 

 system of classification, he did what was of even greater 

 service in this transitional period, he prepared and 

 published many monographs on individual orders and 

 compared them with their nearest allies, thus demon- 

 strating within narrower cycles of affinity the broader 

 principles that he regarded as those that should guide 

 future progress towards the goal that all true taxo- 

 nomists saw ever ahead, viz. the formation of a genuine 

 natural classification founded on racial affinity and 

 blood relationship. 



The great American taxonomist, Asa Gray, summed 

 up Brown's characteristics in the following striking 

 words : " Brown delighted to rise from a special case to 

 a high and wide generalisation, and was apt to draw 

 most important and always irresistible conclusions from 

 small selected data, or particular points of structure, 

 which to ordinary apprehension would appear wholly 

 inadequate to the purpose. He had unequalled skill in 

 finding decisive instances. So all his discoveries, so 

 simply and quietly announced, and all his notes and 

 observations, sedulously reduced to the briefest expres- 

 sions, are fertile far beyond the reader's expectation. 

 Cautious to excess, never suggesting a theory until he 

 had thoroughly weighed all the available objections to it, 

 and never propounding a view which he did not know 

 how to prove, perhaps no naturalist ever taught so much 

 in writing so little, or made so few statements that had 

 to be recalled or even recast." 



On Robert Brown, also, the distinguished naturalist 

 Von Humboldt conferred the title so well merited as to 

 receive universal confirmation by all his fellow botanists : 



