BROWN’S BOTANICAL BIBLE
Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen
The Old Testament of Australian flora.
Known (for short) simply as the Prodromus (from “promus” meaning provisional) this is Australia’s botanical bible. In two parts: Novae Hollandiae being Australia and Insulae the island of Van Diemen being Tasmania.
The fruit, in 1810, of three years of collecting and five years study, all by a single Scottish scientist named Robert Brown, the Prodromus is over 500 densely-packed pages of descriptions—entirely in Latin—that offer the shape and size of every visible part from root to seed for over three thousand Australian plants, together with descriptions of their habit. And most significantly, for the first time, all classified. Sixty-four classes and 137 genera of plants were propagated to make order.
The rare first edition copy (in the gallery above) that belongs to the Tasmanian State Library was owned by a Tasmanian botany professor and the marginal additions (also in Latin) to the text made with a fine nib ink pen are his. He also added his own specimens using the book’s leaves as a press.
The publication of the Prodromus inspired other greats in the field like John Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin, Ronald Campbell Gunn, James Dickinson, and Baron von Mueller to visit the Mountain. And the work adds a further laurel to the mountain’s brow as a place of international scientific heritage significance.