Brown, Robert

Brown, Robert, 1773–1858, Scottish botanist and botanical explorer. In 1801 he went as a naturalist on one of Matthew Flinders's expeditions to Australia, returning (1805) to England with valuable collections. In his Prodromus florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen (1810) he described Australian flora. A leading botanist of his day, he served as librarian to the Linnaean Society and to Sir Joseph Banks and later as curator at the British Museum. He observed Brownian movement in 1827, discovered the cell nucleus in 1831, and was the first to recognize gymnosperm as a distinct angiosperm. His studies of several plant families and of pollen were also notable.

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Brown, Robert

(born Dec. 21, 1773, Montrose, Angus, Scot.—died June 10, 1858, London, Eng.) Scottish botanist. The son of a clergyman, he studied medicine in Aberdeen and Edinburgh before entering the British army as an ensign and assistant surgeon (1795). He obtained the post of naturalist aboard a ship bound to survey the coasts of Australia (1801), and on the journey he gathered some 3,900 plant species. He published some of the results of his trip in 1810 in his classic Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae…, laying the foundations of Australian botany and refining prevailing plant classification systems. In 1827 he transferred Joseph Banks's botanical collection to the British Museum and became keeper of the museum's newly formed botanical department. The following year he published his observation of the phenomenon that came to be called Brownian motion. In 1831 he noted the existence in plant cells of what he called the nucleus. He was the first to recognize the distinction between gymnosperms and angiosperms (flowering plants).