at once set about to utilise the vast resources which were now at his command.
He contributed to the narrative of The Flinders Expedition an account of the vegetation of New Holland. The essay is a remarkable one, not only for the masterly descriptions of the principal genera and orders which it contains, and the critical remarks which are scattered through the pages, but also for the geographical and statistical methods of treatment which he introduced. Many of the orders are new, and Brown shews his striking perception of affinity not only in his general discussion of the subject as a whole, but also in the definitions of the new orders and genera which he founded. This soundness of judgment is shewn on a still larger scale in his more definitely systematic works such as the Prodromus, but one may regard it generally as an astonishing tribute to his sagacity that very few of the groups founded by him have needed serious revision, even when further discoveries made it possible for later botanists to fill up the lacunae inevitable during those earlier days.
In the year 1810 there appeared the first volume of his great work, the Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae. It is a misfortune that only one volume was ever published, although the work was advanced in MS. It has been said that a criticism of the author's Latinity at the hands of a reviewer was the cause of the stoppage of the publication, but there seems to be no real foundation for the story. Possibly the expense, coupled with the small return, may at any rate partly account for it. Be this as it may, Brown recalled from his bookseller all the unsold copies, and in the copy preserved at the Natural History Museum there is a list of the volumes actually sold written by Brown himself, and from a financial point of view the enterprise clearly proved itself to be an expensive experiment. The volume as published is a remarkable work, containing some 450 pages, including 464 genera, nearly one-third of which are here described for the first time and the number of species amounts to about 2000, some three-quarters of which were new to science. Add to this the fact that the flora as a whole is very unlike that of the northern hemisphere, also that the work was accomplished with such amazing rapidity (largely owing to his particular
