Scottish botanist who made a number of scientific discoveries and travelled on the Flinders circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-1805. His early plant collections in New Holland (Australia) earned Brown the distinction of being one of the fathers of Australian botany.

Robert Brown was born in Montrose, Scotland, where he developed an interest in botany while young. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh (1790-1793), attaining a diploma but not a degree. At this time he actively pursued his interest in plants, collecting specimens for the botanist William Withering and presenting his first botanical paper, "The botanical history of Angus". Commissioned as an ensign (and later assistant surgeon) in the Fifeshire Regiment of Fencible Infantry in 1795, he saw service in Ireland, where he also collected plants and prepared manuscript works describing them. Beginning to specialise in mosses, he also trained himself in microscopy and struck up correspondence with a number of botanists in Britain and Europe, including James Edward Smith and the Portuguese exile José Correia da Serra. Thus establishing himself in the field of botany, Brown was elected an Associate of the Linnean Society. In 1799 he found himself in London on recruiting service, where he took the opportunity to feed his passion by visiting Joseph Banks' herbarium and library in Soho Square. Banks would soon offer Brown just the opportunity he dreamed of.

In 1800, on the suggestion of Correia da Serra, Banks offered the keen naturalist a place on the HMS Investigator with Matthew Flinders. Lieutentant Flinders had gained a commission from Banks to explore the circumference of New Holland to see if it was one island or many. The 27-year-old Brown would be assisted by artist Ferdinand Bauer and gardener Peter Good, joining others aboard the vessel including the landscape artist William Westall, mineralogist John Allen and astronomer John Crosley (who left the ship at the Cape of Good Hope after falling ill). Their captain, Flinders, was in 1800 freshly returned from two tours of New Holland with George Bass.

The Investigator, equipped with a prefabricated plant house for living specimens, set off on 18 July 1801. After stops at Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope (where Brown ascended Table Mountain), the party reached Cape Leeuwin on the south-west tip of Western Australia in December that year. Anchoring in King George Sound, the scientific team made their first major collections on Australian soil, consisting of some 500 plants. By January 1802 they were on the coast of South Australia, where, disembarking at Fowler's Bay on January 28, J.H. Maiden notes (1907) that this must be the first location in South Australia visited by any botanist or collector. Brown was also the first botanist to land in the state of Victoria. A week later the party was at Franklin's Isles, where a promontory from the mainland was named Point Brown in honour of the pioneering botanist. Nearly ten days were spent at Port Lincoln (named by Flinders, who came from Lincolnshire), and on 10 March Brown ascended another eponymous geographical feature, Mount Brown, with Bauer and Westall, before boarding ship again to sail south down Spencer's Gulf. In early April, having rounded Cape Willoughby, the ship was greeted by the sight of Nicholas Baudin's Le Géographe, with Brown's French counterpart on board, the botanist Leschenault de la Tour. The bay was therefore named Encounter Bay.

In May 1802 the ship reached Port Jackson (Sydney), where Flinders' party overwintered before continuing north along the coast to Queensland. Brown was somewhat disappointed at the collections around this time, for the season being late meant that much of the flora was “destitute of flower and fruit”, as Brown explained in a letter to Banks in October 1802, and yielded no more than 200 new species. After surveying the Gulf of Carpenteria the ship sailed for Indonesia, anchoring at Timor for repairs before continuing down the western coast of Australia. Arriving back at Port Jackson in June 1803, the Investigator became the first vessel to complete a circumnavigation of Australia. This triumph was marred, however, by the death of the gardener Peter Good, who had contracted dysentery when the ship was outside Timor.

In August 1802 Flinders decided to return to England to find a replacement for the Investigator, which had become unseaworthy. The Porpoise carried Flinders and a selection of Brown's specimens towards England, but was lost on the Great Barrier Reef on 17 August. Flinders escaped and made his way back to Sydney on a cutter, but the collections were lost. The next ship he took charge of, the Cumberland, set sail from Sydney in late 1803, but had to put in at Mauritius for repairs. It was an inauspicious move, however, for the island was under the control of France, then at war with England, and Flinders was imprisoned. He did not reach England again until 1810, and in poor health died four years later just as his account of the Australian voyage was completed.

Brown, meanwhile, remained in New South Wales with Bauer while Flinders set off on his ill-starred return journey. Together they collected specimens around Port Jackson before Brown made his way to Tasmania in November 1803, where he stayed for nine months, collecting in the area of the Derwent River and ascending Mount Wellingston ten times. Browns River near Hobart commemorates him. Periodically sending shipments of specimens to Banks, he also kept up a regular correspondence. Bauer, meanwhile, made a survey of the flora on Norfolk Island before joining Brown again at Kingstown, New South Wales, and together they finally returned to England in October 1805, sailing, ironically for poor Flinders, in the repaired Investigator. The ship carried 1,200 plants, seeds, minerals and zoological collections. In all, Brown, Bauer and the late Good collected more than 3,600 dried plants on the voyage, more than half of them new to science.

Brown’s first paper resulting from the expedition, on Proteaceae, appeared in 1810, following by his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae (also 1810), in which he reported nearly 200 new genera and over 1,000 new species. Enthusiastically received by European botanists, it earned him his FRS status in 1811, but lack of sales of the expensive Prodromus meant that only a fraction of the sections Brown had planned were actually published. Nevertheless, 1810 brought more kudos to the premier botanist of Australian flora as Banks recruited Brown to replace his right-hand man, the librarian Jonas Dryander, deceased that year. Brown was also clerk and librarian to the Linnean Society from 1805-1822.

A decade later, with Banks on his own deathbed, Brown was in line to inherit a life interest in the famous herbarium and library at Soho Square (where he himself died in June 1858). Banks stipulated that on Brown's death the collections should go to the British Museum, though in fact Brown donated them to the Museum well before then, in 1827, when he took the title Keeper of the Banksian Botanical Collections at the British Museum (in 1837 he was made the first Keeper of the Botanical Department). His successor, J.J. Bennett (1807-1876), took possession of the Brown herbarium in 1858, which was accessed by George Bentham for purposes of compiling his Flora Australiensis. A list of the species in Brown's collection was compiled by James Britten (1846-1924) and Henry Trimen (1843-1896) and sets were distributed to Edinburgh and Kew after Bennett's death. Sets were also sent to Melbourne, Sydney and Wellington.

Brown served as President of the Linnean Society from 1849-1853 and made a number of scientific discoveries, especially through microscopy. These included 'Brownian motion', whereby particles suspended in a fluid appear to move randomly; noticing and coining the nucleus of the vegetable cell; and cytoplasmic streaming. His broad interests took in palynology and palaeobotany, though he published little on the latter. He is commemorated in the species Eucalyptus brownii Maiden & Cambage, Banksia brownii Baxter ex R.Br. and the genus Brunonia R.Br.

Sources:
I.B. Balfour, 1858, Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, 6: 119-128
R. Brown (edited by T.G. Vallance, S.G. Moore and E.W. Groves), 2001, Nature's Investigator: the diary of Robert Brown in Australia
R. Desmond and C. Ellwood, 1994, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists: 108
P. Edwards in D.J. and S.G.M Carr, 1981, People and Plants in Australia: 139-163
J.D. Hooker, 1887-1888, Proceedings of the Linnean Society: 54-67
D. Mabberley, 1985, Jupiter botanicus: Robert Brown of the British Museum
J.H. Maiden, 1907, "A Century of Botanical Endeavour in South Australia", Report of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 7: 151-167
J. Ramsbottom et al., 1932, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 144: 17-54
W.T. Stearn, in R. Brown, 1960, Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae.