Abstract
Robert Brown was born in Montrose, Scotland, December 21, 1773, into a family with a religious background. The rugged and beautiful Scottish countryside was a factor in stimulating his fascination with the natural world. When he went to live in Edinburgh, the University’s environment and its intellectual excitement inspired him. Brown’s contacts in Edinburgh were crucial to sha** his early career. Brown attended Rev. Dr. John Walker’s lectures in natural history at the University where Walker was Professor of Natural History and a horticulturalist. Brown collected plants for Walker, particularly specimens of bryophytes and lichens. Botanist William Withering, who also received his education at Edinburgh University, was influential in guiding young Brown’s field studies. With this encouragement, Brown continued his work on the flora of Scotland, methodically describing plants at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Brown gathered a good deal of information from his field work which served as the basis of his study, “The Botanical History of Angus,” delivered before the Edinburgh Natural History Society. He discontinued his medical education, providing more time to pursue his interest in botany.
Mungo Park was born on September 10, 1771, in Foulshiels in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk, in the border region of Scotland, also into a religious family. He developed a love of Scottish ballads and stories and adventure. At the age of 17, he enrolled at Edinburgh University to begin formal medical studies. Park spent 3 years studying medicine at Edinburgh University (1788–1791), while continuing his botanical studies in the Scottish Highlands with his brother-in-law, James Dickson. Dickson was one of a number of Scottish botanist-gardeners who traveled south to England, particularly the London area, to work and study. Dickson became friends with Joseph Banks, and Banks allowed Dickson (and eventually Park) the use of his extensive library in London. When Dickson introduced Park to Banks, he was impressed by the younger man’s knowledge of botany and helped him secure a post as assistant-surgeon or surgeon’s mate on the Worcester, a vessel belonging to the East India Company’s fleet of ships. While in Sumatra, a British possession run by the East India Company, Park collected botanical specimens for Banks. Park had time to dredge the waters, particularly along the shore, and when the ship moved from Bencoolen to Rat Island, he turned his attention to plant life while exploring the Sumatran mountains. His study of the fish he dredged up led to a paper describing eight species of previously unnamed Sumatran fish, and it was first presented in a lecture to the Linnean Society when he returned. Park returned to Britain imbued with a renewed interest in geographical exploration and natural history.
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Notes
- 1.
Marischal College, Aberdeen, enjoyed a rich scientific tradition. Later on, physicist James Clerk Maxwell taught there from 1856 to 1860.
- 2.
A freethinker, Brown’s father was an independent man when it came to religious practices, forcing him ultimately to leave rural Scotland for Edinburgh.
- 3.
David J. Mabberley speculated that Park might have introduced Brown to his brother-in-law, James Dickson, a Scot who had returned to Scotland after serving as nurseryman of Covent Garden because their interests were similar at the time, Jupiter Botanicus, Robert Brown of the British Museum (London: British Museum (Natural History), 1985), p. 19. Like Brown, Park also went on to reject Linnaeus’s artificial system of classification based on the sexuality of plants but did not have the opportunity of further expanding his ideas on this subject. Brown and Park’s careers did intersect later on, when Park indirectly, but significantly, impacted Brown’s career by refusing to serve as naturalist on board H.M.S. Investigator, thereby opening the door for Brown.
- 4.
James Dickson, Mungo Park’s brother-in-law, was a nurseryman who collected British plants and specialized in mosses. He opened a plant and seed shop in Covent Garden and became friendly with Sir Joseph Banks, introducing Park to Banks.
- 5.
Don was against church orthodoxy, but Brown’s association with Don did not handicap his early career, and Brown, already influenced by his father’s nonconformist religious views, became a religious skeptic.
- 6.
Withering was a progressive man of science, witnessed by his membership in the Lunar Society and his opposition to the phlogiston theory.
- 7.
There is a copy of the letter at the Birmingham, England Library; the original copy has not been found. See T. Whitmore Peck and K. Douglas Wilkinson’s William Withering of Birmingham (Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Co., 1950) for a thorough account of Withering’s life and contributions. What is interesting is that this volume does not discuss Brown at all.
- 8.
The sect held beliefs close to those of the Puritans.
- 9.
Banks received a letter dated 10 March 1792 from John Crisp (d. 1803), who was an official of the East India Company and a natural historian and fellow of the Royal Society. Crisp served as deputy governor at Fort Marlborough, Sumatra, at the time (1789–1793), and at the bottom of the letter there is a note in Banks’s hand which he added to this letter: “Mr Mungo Park Surgeons mate Worcester,” Sir Joseph Banks, The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), volume 4, page 110, letter 1098.
- 10.
A copy of the letter is in Joseph Thomson’s Mungo Park and the Niger (London: G. Philip & Sons, 1890) [Argosy 1970 Reprint] pp. 42–43; the original copy has not been found.
- 11.
Thomson, Mungo Park and the Niger, p. 43.
- 12.
This information is provided in the Worcester’s log, preserved in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
- 13.
Kenneth Lupton’s Mungo Park, The African Traveler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) established the correct year of the voyage by examining the log of the Worcester. It was a year later than reported by Park, who erred when he dated it a year earlier, and subsequent biographers continued the error until Lupton gave the correct date.
- 14.
The paper “Descriptions of Eight New Fishes from Sumatra” was published in Transactions of the Linnean Society (1797) 3: 33–38, and with the exception of its introduction was written in Latin. The paper was read before the Society on November 4, 1794.
- 15.
These watercolors are now housed in the British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington, London. Park’s Linnean Society paper contains a beautifully colored chromolithograph of a species of Perca, Perca canaliculatus.
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Schwartz, J. (2021). “… The Plants of Scotland Might Be Equally Useful”. In: Robert Brown and Mungo Park. Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74859-3_3
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