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( Robert Brown (botanist))
Robert Brown FRS (21 December 1773 – 10 June 1858) was a Scottish scientist who is acknowledged as the leading botanist to collect in Australia during the first half of the 19th century. He also is credited with the first observation of Brownian motion. Brown was born in Montrose, Scotland on 21 December 1773. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a classmate of Thomas Dick. He joined the Fencibles regiment of the army as a surgeon in 1795. In December 1800 he accepted an offer of the position of naturalist on board the Investigator under Matthew Flinders, which was about to depart on its historic voyage to chart the coast of Australia. The Investigator arrived in King George Sound in what is now Western Australia in December 1801. For three and a half years Brown did intensive botanic research in Australia, collecting about 3400 species, of which about 2000 were previously unknown. A large part of this collection was lost, however, when the Porpoise was wrecked en route to England. Brown remained in Australia until May 1805. He then returned to England where he spent the next five years working on the material he had gathered. He published numerous species descriptions; in Western Australia alone he is the author of nearly 1200 species. In 1810, he published the results of his collecting in his famous Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen, the first systematic account of the Australian flora. That year, he succeeded Jonas C. Dryander as Sir Joseph Banks' librarian, and on Banks' death in 1820 Brown inherited his library and herbarium. This was transferred to the British Museum in 1827, and Brown was appointed Keeper of the Banksian Botanical Collection. In a paper read to the Linnean society in 1831 and published in 1833, Brown named the cell nucleus. The nucleus had been observed before, perhaps as early as 1682 by the Dutch microscopist Leeuwenhoek, and Franz Bauer had noted and drawn it as a regular feature of plant cells in 1802, but it was Brown who gave it the name it bears to this day (while giving credit to Bauer's drawings). Neither Bauer nor Brown thought the nucleus to be universal, and Brown thought it to be primarily confined to Monocotyledons.[1]
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