To a sensitive man the daily wear and tear of a journalist's life in London is often murderous, always exhausting—and Dr. Brown was very sensitive. Beneath the genial exterior, which seemed to indicate a careless, light-hearted spirit, lay great depths of feeling, and a tenderness that shrank from expressing itself. The man was too proud and self-restrained to betray these depths even to those nearest and dearest to him. This was at once a nobility in him and a weakness. Had he opened his heart more, he would have chafed and fretted less, little annoyances would not have become mountain loads of care. But the truth is, Dr. Brown was not cut out for the life of an everyday journalist, either by training, habits, or disposition. The ideal post for him would have been that of a professor at some great university, where he could have had abundant leisure to pursue his favourite studies, where young men would have surrounded him and listened with delight to the outpouring of the wealth of lore with which his capacious intellect was stored. His lot was otherwise cast, and he accepted it manfully, battling with his destiny to his last hours, grimly and in silence of soul, intent only on one thing, to lift his children clear above the necessity for treading the same rough road upon which he had worn himself out.
Other and worthier hands than mine may trace, it is to be hoped, the story of his life, his expeditions in America and Greenland, and his many literary labours not only in popularising scientific subjects, with a thoroughness and attractiveness too little recognised, but in walks apart where the multitude could not judge him. My dominant feeling about him for many years has been one of regret that he should be wearing his life away so fast. He never learned to play; to be completely idle for a day even became, latterly, irksome, almost irritating, to him. His fingers itched to hold the pen, to handle a book. Although in earlier times he could enjoy a brief holiday, he ever mixed work with his pleasure; could, indeed, accept no pleasure which did not imply work somewhere close to his hand. Thus his various journeys to Morocco, ostensibly taken, at any rate the earlier of them, to escape from all kinds of work, and from the sight of the day's newspaper, ended in his becoming the foremost authority in Great Britain upon the literature, present social condition, and probable future of that perishing country. The acquisition of this knowledge was all in his day's enjoyment.
The testimony of the introduction and notes to this little book is enough to prove how thoroughly and conscientiously everything that Dr. Brown undertook was done. The question of payment rarely entered into his calculations. Some of his very best work was done for nothing, because he loved to do it. Witness his edition of Leo Africanus, prepared for the Hakluyt Society, and his innumerable memoirs to the various learned Societies of which he was a member.
Few of Dr. Brown's London friends were aware that his attainments as a scientific botanist were of the highest order. Yet in this department of science alone he had written thirty papers and reports, besides an advanced text-book of Botany (published by William Blackwood and Sons), before the summer of 1872, when he was only thirty years of age. These were entirely outside his contributions to general literature on that and other subjects, already at that date numerous; and if we add to the list the various reports, essays, memoranda contributed by him to the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, of which he was President, to the Royal Geographical Society, of whose Council he was a member at his death, and to numerous other bodies, as well as to scientific and popular journals, on geographical, geological, and zoological subjects, from first to last the total mounts to several hundreds. In these branches of science his heart lay always, but he laboured for his daily bread and to give to him that needed.
The portrait forming the frontispiece to this volume is from a photograph of Dr. Brown taken in 1870, just after his return from his last expedition to Greenland, and represents him much as he looked when, some years later, he first came to London, after failing to obtain the chair of Botany in Edinburgh University. That was a disappointment which he cannot be said ever to have entirely surmounted. The memory of it to some extent kept him aloof from his fellow-labourers in the world of journalism. What work he had to do he did loyally, manfully, and with the most scrupulous care; but he lived a man apart, more or less, from his first coming among us to the end. In his family circle, and where he was really known, his loss has brought a great sorrow.
A. J. W.
London, February 16, 1896.