THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE [SECOND SERIES.] ART. XVII.—Obituary Notices of Brown and Humboldt, Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; from the Report of the Council of the Academy for 1859. (Proceedings of the Academy, vol. iv, p. 229 et seq.) BEYOND the immediate pale of science, and the circle of its most devoted cultivators, the association of the names of HUмBOLDT and BROWN may seem new and strange;-the one, a name familiar to the whole civilized world; the other, hardly known to a large portion of his educated countrymen. Yet these names stand together, in the highest place, upon the rolls of almost every Academy of Science in the world; and the common judg ment of those competent to pronounce it will undoubtedly be, that although these vacant places upon those honorable rolls may be occupied, they will not be filled, in this, perhaps not in several generations. Upon the death of ROBERT BROWN, which occurred on the 10th of June last, in his eighty-fifth year, it was remarked that, next to Humboldt, his name adorned the honorary list of a greater number of scientific societies than that of any other naturalist or philosopher. It was Humboldt himself who, many years ago, saluted Brown with the appellation of Botanicarum facile Princeps; and the universal consent of botanists recognized and confirmed the title. However the meed of merit in science should be divided between the most profound, and the most active and prolific minds,-between those who divine and those SECOND SERIES, VOL. XXVIII, No. 83.-SEPT., 1859. - who elaborate,—it will probably be conceded by all, that no one since Linnæus has brought such rare sagacity to bear upon the structure, and especially upon the ordinal characters and natural affinities of plants, as did Robert Brown. True, he was fortunate in his time and his opportunities. Men of great genius, happily, often are, or appear to be, through their power of turning opportunities to good account. The whole herbaria of Sir Joseph Banks, and the great collections which he himself made around the coast of Australia, in Flinder's expedition, and which he was able to investigate upon the spot during the four years devoted to this exploration, opportunely placed in Brown's able hands as it were the vegetation of a new world, as rich as it was peculiar, just at the time, too, when the immortal work of Jussieu had begun to be appreciated, and the European and other ordinary forms of vegetation had begun to be understood in their natural relations. The new, various, and singular types which render the botany of New Holland so unlike all other, Mr. Brown had to compare among themselves,-to unravel their intricacies with scarcely a clew to guide him, except that which his own genius enabled him to construct in the process of the research, and to bring them harmoniously into the general system of botanical natural alliance as then understood, and as he was himself enabled to ascertain and display it. It was the wonderful sagacity and insight which he evinced in these investigations, which, soon after his return from Australia, revealed the master mind in botanical science, and erelong gave him the position of almost unchallenged eminence, which he retained, as if without effort, for more than half a century. The common observer must wonder at this general recognition, during an era of great names and unequalled activity, of a claim so rarely, and as it were so reluctantly, asserted. For brief and comparatively few-alas! how much fewer than they should have been!-are Mr. Brown's publications. Much the largest of them is the Prodromus of the Flora of New Holland, issued fifty years ago, which begins upon the one hundred and forty-fifth page, and which stopped short at the end of the first volume. The others are special papers, mostly of small bulk, devoted to the consideration of a particular plant, or a particular group or small collection of plants. But their simple_titles seldom foreshow the full import of their contents. Brown delighted to rise from a special case to high and wide generalizations; and was apt to draw most important and always irresistible conclusions from some small, selected data, or particular point 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 expression, 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; and of no one can there be a stronger regret that he did not publish more. With this character of mind, and while carefully sounding his way along the deep places of a science the philosophy and grounds of which were forming, day by day, under his own and a few contemporary hands, Brown could not have been a voluminous writer. He could never have undertaken a Systema Regni Vegetabilis, content to do his best at the moment, and to take upon trust what he had not the means or the time to verify,like his contemporary, DeCandolle who may worthily be compared with Brown for genius, and contrasted with him for the enthusiastic devotion which constantly impelled him to publication, and to lifelong, unselected, herculean labor, over all the field, for the general good. Nor could Brown ever be brought to undertake a Genera Plantarum, like that of Jussieu; although his favorable and leisurely position, his vast knowledge, his keen discrimination, and his most compact mode of expression, especially indicated him for the task. Evidently, his influence upon the progress of Botany might have been greater, or at least more immediate and more conspicuous. Yet, rightly to estimate that influence now, we have only to compare the Genera Plantarum of Endlicher with that of Jussieu,-separated as they are by the half-century which coincided with Brown's career,-and mark how largely the points of difference between the two, so far as they represent inquiry, and genuine advancement in the knowledge of floral structure, actually originated with him. Still, after making due allowance for a mind as scrupulous and cautious as it was clear and profound, also for an unusually retiring disposition, which even in authorship seems to have rendered him as sedulous to avoid publicity as most writers are to gain it, it must be acknowledged that his retentiveness was excessive; and that his guarded published statements sometimes appear as if intended-like the anagrams of the older mathematicians and philosophers-rather to record his knowledge than to reveal it. But this was probably only in appearance, and rather to be attributed to his sensitive regard for entire accuracy, and his extreme dislike of all parade of knowledge, to the same peculiarity which everywhere led him to condense announcements of great consequence into short paragraphs or foot-notes, and to insert the most important facts in parentheses, which he who runs over the page may read, indeed, |