Forest Buffen Harkness Brown

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Forest Buffen Harkness Brown, often Forest BH Brown (* 1873 in Rushville (New York) , † 1954 in Ohio ) was an American botanist specializing in vascular spore plants and seed plants .

His botanical author abbreviation is " F.Br. ".

Life

Brown attended college in Ypsilanti (Michigan) and then studied forestry, botany and ecology at the University of Michigan from 1902 . He graduated in 1903 with the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and MS . Early on he dealt with the distribution of plants in the floodplain of the Huron River near Ypsilanti.

He first worked in Oklahoma for the United States Forest Service , then became a professor of botany at Ohio State University . where he was also head of the botanical garden from 1911 to 1916. In 1918 he received the Ph.D. and became a Fellow of Yale University . On August 20 of the same year he married the biologist Elizabeth Dorothy Wuist, with whom he went to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum , Honolulu in 1920 and then took part in the Bayard Dominick Expedition of the Bishop Museum until the end of 1922 . Several teams, including the ethnologist Edward S. Handy , worked on this mission, which carried out ethnological, archaeological and botanical field research in the Pacific region . The couple visited the Marquesas , the Tuamotu Archipelago and New Zealand and brought back 9,000 dried plants and 120 wood samples.

Works (selection, chronological)

  • A botanical survey of the Huron River Valley. Article, 1905
  • Starch Reserve in Relation to the Production of Sugar, Flowers, Leaves, and Seed in Birch and Maple. The Ohio Naturalist (Biological Club of the Ohio State University), 1914.
  • The Secondary Xylem of Hawaiian Trees . Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu 1922.
  • Flora of Southeastern Polynesia. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu 1931-35. (3 volumes)

Trivia

Thor Heyerdahl had actually only studied Brown's three-volume work in Oslo to find Polynesian islands with enough edible plants for his dropout experiment. It was only on Fatuhiva in 1937 that he realized that Brown provided a decisive impetus for the development of Heyerdahl's own theory, which made Brown's assumption from the 1930s plausible through the Kon-Tiki expedition (1947). Brown did not experience scientific acceptance (1962!).

Sources and Notes

  • Short biography from TL2, Appendix 3, p. 134 (see web links)
  1. ↑ Science Magazine, October 1, 1920, p. 311: "Expeditions of the Bishop Museum."
  2. ^ Forest BH Brown, Botanist, returned to Honolulu on December 16, 1922, after a period of two years spent in the Marquesas and neighboring parts of the Pacific as a member of the Bayard Dominick Expedition ... Report of the Director for 1922. Bishop Museum Press 1923.
  3. ↑ Ragnar Kvam jr .: Biography Heyerdahl, p. 168: Kvam also refers to Heyerdahl, who quotes from Brown, Vol. III: “... there must undoubtedly be a certain contact between the natives on the American continent and the Marquesas Islands have given…"

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brown, Forest Buffen Harkness
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brown, Forest Bra
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American botanist
DATE OF BIRTH 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Rushville (New York)
DATE OF DEATH 1954
Place of death Ohio