French monk, teacher and naturalist. Arsène Gustave Joseph Brouard was born near Orléans in Loiret, France, and was trained in botany while serving, from the age of 17, as secretary and assistant to the botanist E.L.de la Chapelle. Two years later, after the death of his master, Arsène was already so highly regarded as a botanist that he was elected honorary president of the Botanical Society of Limousin. After brief periods as a salesman and in the army, he joined the teaching order Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes in 1895.
In 1906, a year after the French government imposed laws separating church and state, which included the suppression of church schools, Brother Arsène left France to teach in Mexico. He spent eight years teaching science, French, and mathematics at the order's schools in Puebla (1906), Morelia (1909), Mexico City, and Querétero, and made a study of the natural history of these areas. He regularly took his students and brethren on long hikes to collect plants, and together they assembled a collection of 12,000 lichens, mosses, ferns, and flowering plants, including nearly 200 new species. It was his habit to collect many duplicates, which he would send to experts for identification, inclusion in herbaria, and sales to collectors. Prince Roland Bonaparte was among the buyers of his specimen sheets.
Early in the Mexican Revolution, the monks were forced to leave the country (1914). Brother Arsène discovered several new species of lichen in Cuba on his way to the United States. He never returned to France. He taught at schools in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and finally New Mexico. While teaching at St Paul's College in Covington, Louisiana (1919-1925) he collected approximately 900 species.
He moved to New Mexico in 1926 for the sake of his health and remained there the rest of his life. He taught at Sacred Heart Training College in Las Vegas and at St Michael's College in Santa Fe and collected extensively in northern New Mexico. His herbarium of 5,000 specimens constitutes the first extensive collections in the area since the 1840s and includes some of the earliest cryptogam records for New Mexico. Duplicates were sent to various experts for identification: grasses to A.S. Hitchcock and M.A. Chase; non-grass spermatophytes to P.C. Standley; lichens (including 60 new species) to M.B. de Lesdain; mosses to E.B. Bartram; and hepatics to C.C. Haynes. He also made zoological collections. Brother Arsène is commemorated in the names of at least 24 botanical species including Ageratum arsenei B.L.Rob., Notholaena arsenii Christ and Spiranthes arseniana Kraenzl.
Sources:
E.B. Bartram, 1931, "Mosses of Northern Mexico collected by Brother Arséne", Annales de Cryptogamie Exotique, 4(3,4)
D.W. Johnson and M.R. Johnson, 2002, Botanical Collections of Brother Gerfroy Arsene Brouard
I.W. Knobloch, 1979, The Plant Collectors of Northern Mexico.
