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 114 methods already alluded to), and one cannot withhold admiration at the energy and the learning of its author. It is a wonderful tribute to his wisdom that his descriptions and arrangements should have so stood the test of 100 years, during which time vast strides in our knowledge of the Australian and other floras have been made. But the lapse of time has resulted in scarcely any but trifling modifications of the general results as he left them. The Prodromus is well worth study, for in its pages one constantly meets with hints of observations which have borne fruit in later years. Some of them, indeed, e.g. his observations on Cycads, were expanded by himself into larger treatises in which much light has been thrown on morphological and taxonomic relationships previously but imperfectly understood.

The year before the publication of the Prodromus, Brown communicated to the Linnean Society an excellent and learned memoir on the Proteaceae. In this paper we encounter an instance of that whimsical introduction of observations exceedingly valuable in themselves, but mainly irrelevant to the matter in hand, which is a characteristic feature of many of his works. Perhaps it was due to the intense keenness with which he always followed up problems that interested him, so that, like Mr Dick's weakness for King Charles' head, they had to find a place in whatever else he was writing about. Thus his treatise on the Proteaceae starts off with advice to study the flower in the young, instead of only in its adult condition, and this is driven home by an excellent disquisition on the structure of the androecium and gynaeceum of Asclepiads, a subject which occupied his mind for some years and formed the basis for separate papers at subsequent periods. Only when he has discussed the morphology of the Asclepiad flower does he plunge, abruptly, into the questions relating directly to the Proteaceae.

Later on in the same year (1809) he read a masterly paper on the Asclepiadaceae which was subsequently printed in the Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. This Natural Order was here separated by him from the Apocynaceae, from which it had not previously been distinguished, and a correct account of the relations of the remarkable androecium, so