CX1V FLORA OF TASMANIA. [.Progress of Australian 
In 1791, Captain Vancouver's expedition, consisting of two ships, the ' Discovery ' and f Chat- 
ham/ when on their voyage to north-west America, discovered King George's Sound. The expedition 
was accompanied by Mr. A. Menzies, a zealous botanist, who formed a good collection at this port, 
some of the plants of which appear in Brown's ' Prodromus.' 
In 1801, Captain Flinders' s voyage, undertaken to complete the discovery of Terra Australis, was 
commenced : and it was continued during the two succeeding years in the f Investigator,' ' Porpoise,' 
and ' Cumberland.' Owing to the late Robert Brown having accompanied this voyage, it proved, as 
far as botany is concerned, the most important in its results ever undertaken, and hence marks an 
epoch in the history of that science. Brown united a thorough knowledge of the botany of his day, 
with excellent powers of observation, consummate sagacity, an unerring memory, and indefatigable 
zeal and industry as a collector and investigator j he had further the advantage of being accompanied 
by a botanical draughtsman, Ferdinand Bauer, who proved no less distinguished as a microscopic 
observer than as an artist; and he had a gardener, Mr. Peter Good, to assist in the manual 
operations of collecting and preserving. Hence, when we regard the interest and novelty of the field 
of research, the rare combination of qualities in the botanist, and the advantages and facilities which 
he enjoyed, we can easily understand why the botanical results should have been so incomparably 
greater, not merely than those of any previous voyage, but than those of all similar voyages put 
together. The ' Investigator ' reached King George's Sound in 1802, where Brown collected 500 
species, and afterwards coasted along through Bass's Straits to Port Jackson. In July, 1802, the 
northern survey was commenced, and that of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the rotten state of 
the ship obliged her captain to run to Timor, whence they returned by the west and south coast 
again to Port Jackson. The ' Investigator ' was here condemned, and Captain Flinders hired another 
ship to sail for England, in which he took the duplicates of Brown's collections. Unfortunately this 
vessel was wrecked on the Cato Reef, in lat. 23° S., but the Captain, and eventually the whole crew, 
reached Port Jackson : the duplicate collections were of course lost. Brown and Bauer had mean- 
while been left in New South Wales, where they explored the Blue Mountains ; and Brown also 
visited the islands of Bass's Straits and Tasmania, where he resided for some months, at Risdon, on 
the Derwent. 
Brown and Bauer finally returned to England in the ' Investigator,' arriving in 1805 with a 
complete set of all their collections. On his return Brown was directed by the Board of Admiralty 
to publish his plants, and the commencement appeared in 1810, as the 'Prodromus Flora Novee- 
Hollandiie,' and another contribution in 1814, as the Appendix to Captain Flinders's Voyage. The 
first of these works, though a fragment, has for half a century maintained its reputation unimpugned, 
of being the greatest botanical work that has ever appeared. 
Captain King's voyages come next under review, and owing to that able officer's own love of 
natural history, and the encouragement he consequently gave to the botanist, Allan Cunningham, who 
accompanied him, his surveys have been the means of adding very largely to our knowledge of the 
vegetation especially of tropical Australia. As however the botanical interest of his expeditions 
centres in Mr. Cunningham, who was even more celebrated as an inland explorer and Colonial 
botanist than as the companion of Captain King, I shall include a notice of the principal points 
touched at by Captain King in the following brief sketch of Cunningham's career * 
Allan Cunningham (born 1791) was, when a young man, engaged at Kew in the preparation of 
* Extracted from the interesting biographical memoir of Allan Cunningham, by ft. Heward, Esq., F.L.S., 
and published in the Journal of Botany, vol. iv.*p. 231, and Lond. Journ. Bot. vol. i. p. 107. 
