An exceptionally rare book: the records show just three copies sold publicly since 1950. This ground-breaking study of the botany of New Holland and Van Diemens Land was the work of one of the most important figures of Australian science and botany. As Mabberley has noted, this unillustrated book, never completed, and with various quirks, "… seems an unlikely contender for the most important work on Australian plants ever written, leave alone that it is also one of the most significant botanical books of all time. And it was the first attempt at a full Flora of Australia."

An exceptionally rare book: the records show just three copies sold publicly since 1950. This ground-breaking study of the botany of New Holland and Van Diemens Land was the work of one of the most important figures of Australian science and botany. As Mabberley has noted, this unillustrated book, never completed, and with various quirks, "… seems an unlikely contender for the most important work on Australian plants ever written, leave alone that it is also one of the most significant botanical books of all time. And it was the first attempt at a full Flora of Australia."

Brown sailed with Flinders on the Investigator, staying on with his great friend and colleague Ferdinand Bauer to make his own explorations in Australia and Tasmania, only returning to England in 1805 with his collection of over 4000 plant specimens.

The history of Brown's books in print is famously complex, not least as almost all were effectively privately published and he was reticent, obsessive even, about who was allowed to have copies of his books. Although he produced this first part of his famous Prodromus in 1810, he never completed the book, and since little more than a handful of copies are known today it must have been a very limited printing.

For the ensuing 15 years after his return to England, Brown was librarian and curator to Sir Joseph Banks and, after the death of his great patron in 1820, was given control of the Banks herbarium, in later life working for many years at the British Museum. Brown's book is the first comprehensive account of Australian plants, using his collection, as well as those of Banks and Solander from Cook's first voyage, though the book seems to have escaped the notice of Cook bibliographers, including the encyclopaedic Beddie. The Prodromus is also one of the first works on systematic botany to use de Jussieu's natural system of classification.

As Brown's work was published before Flinders's account of the voyage, he used his own names for localities visited (such as "Bay I" etc). These names in the Prodromus have presented a problem for botanists since, which has now been largely solved by the publication of his diaries from the manuscript in the Australian Museum (Nature's Investigator, ABRS Canberra, 2001).

Brown's contribution to plant taxonomy and physiology is profound; he was the first to make the distinction between gymnosperms and angiosperms (non-flowering and flowering plants); he observed the constant motion of microscopic particles, now termed Brownian motion; and he discovered the nuclei and cytoplasm of plant cells.

According to J. Reynolds Green in his History of Botany in the United Kingdom, the Prodromus added several new natural orders of plants not included in the studies of De Candolle and de Jussieu. Further, it "was marked by a singular accuracy in detail, the language was precise and clear, and showed a powerful grip of the principles of classification as well as the possession of a wonderful power of observation. Brown took the opportunity to modify considerably some of the families of De Jussieu and De Candolle… The Prodromus dealt with… upwards of 2000 species of which the majority were new to science."

Mabberley's long article, an excerpt of which appears above, includes his ironic remark that "This singularly unattractive, unillustrated book, in Latin, being only part of one of two projected volumes, and beginning on page 145 – with no index, badly printed on poor paper, seems an unlikely contender for the most important work on Australian plants ever written, leave alone that it is also one of the most significant botanical books of all time. And it was the first attempt at a full Flora of Australia". He also notes that "by 1859, Joseph Hooker, later director of Kew, who was staggered by the speed with which Brown had worked, could write that the Prodromus had "for half a century maintained its reputation unimpugned, of being the greatest botanical work that [had] ever appeared" lies not only in the emphatic reintroduction of a natural system to Britain and description of new families but also in the redefinition and extension of, besides refinements and amendments to, families thitherto recognised. These revelations had their basis in critical observations in the field in Australia and in his painstaking microscope work in Australia and in London, combined with an understanding of the importance of plant development."