importance than the advance of knowledge by the scientific and scholarly solution of a problem. Such was not Brown's view, and he practised wise delay in publication—nonumque prematur in annum, a maxim so strongly advocated by the Latin poet, was really put into practice by him as it also was by some of his contemporaries. Dryander, Solander and others have left, as Brown has done, rich stores of MS. behind them, which have never passed through the press.
The habit of long and continuous reflection on fundamental problems, which was so marked a feature of Brown's character, was perhaps responsible for the curious manner in which some of his most valuable and suggestive contributions to science, and especially to morphology, were given to the world, a habit to which I have already adverted.
We know he had been for many years interested in the ovule, and he made a number of important discoveries respecting it. Closely bound up with this topic were his studies on the Cycads and Conifers. He observed the plurality of embryos in the seeds of these plants, and, indeed, makes a reference to the phenomenon of polyembryony in the Prodromus, in which, as in most of his systematic works, morphological observations of the highest value are scattered, though embodied in very compressed phrases, amongst the descriptions of species. But every now and then when writing on one subject he seems to be carried away with the rush of his ideas on general questions. Thus in a memoir on the genus Kingia he entitles the paper, possibly to save his face after he had written it, "Character and Description of Kingia; a new genus of plants found on the south-west coast of New Holland. With observations on the Structure of its unimpregnated Ovulum, and on the female flower of Cycadeae and Coniferae."
This paper is, perhaps, one of the most important of his works, for it was there that, having briefly dismissed the genus Kingia, he "let himself go" on the ovule, and then in a masterly dissertation, puts forward his view on the gymnospermic nature of the Cycads and Conifers.
He summarises what was known at that time as to the structure of the ovule, acutely criticising the views of the various
