Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist and palaeobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. He is best known for his descriptions of cell nuclei and of the continuous motion of minute particles in solution, which came to be called Brownian motion.
Background
Brown was born in Montrose on 21 December 1773. He was the son of James Brown, a minister in the Scottish Episcopal Church with Jacobite convictions so strong that in 1788 he defied his church's decision to give allegiance to George III. His mother was Helen née Taylor, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.
Education
He attended Marischal College, Aberdeen, and was graduated from Edinburgh University in 1795.
Career
Serving in the north of Ireland as assistant surgeon in the Forfarshire regiment, he met Sir Joseph Banks, who in 1801 appointed him the naturalist of Capt. Matthew Flinders' expedition. The expedition circumnavigated Australia, visited New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, and made exhaustive studies of the flora. Upon his return to England with more than 4, 000 plant specimens in 1805, Brown was appointed librarian of the Linnaean Society. In 1810, he was appointed librarian to Sir Joseph Banks and that same year published his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen. Brown discovered and named the nucleus of the cell, and observed and depicted nuclei in surface layers of tissue. He pioneered in microscopical examinations of fossils and in observation of the nature of the sexual process (pollination) in higher plants. Because of his attention to detail in microscopic research, Brown made his most important discovery in 1827. He observed pollen grains darting here and there in zigzag fashion. He then tried other substances and found that they possessed this motion when the particles were sufficiently small. From these experiments he concluded that this motion, now known as the Brownian Motion, was due to the activity of suspended particles caused by collision with the molecules of the surrounding solution. On his death in 1820 Sir Joseph Banks bequeathed his library and collections to Brown for life. These Brown transferred to the British Museum in 1827 when he became keeper of its new botanical department. He died in London, June 10, 1858.
Membership
In 1822, he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1827 he became correspondent of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands, three years later he became associated member. When the institute became the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1851 Brown joined as foreign member. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1849.