Correa in England (1795-1801)

Robert Brown

In the last post, I introduced José Correa da Serra, a Portuguese botanist/diplomat/ priest whose liberal views caused him trouble at home and sent him into exile in England in 1795.  This was a turbulent time with Britain just emerging from the loss of its American colonies, the Revolution continuing in France, and Portugal wrestling with its vast colony of Brazil.  No matter where he went Correa managed to be involved in Portuguese diplomatic circles, and botanical circles as well.  Since Portugal lacked a sophisticated scientific community, Correa sought foreign correspondents to share botanical ideas and as sources of the latest information (Davis, 1955).  Whether he planned it this way or not, these contacts allowed him to move from country to country and quickly fit into new botanical milieus.  Since he was already in contact with James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society with whom he corresponded for 38 years, he was able to seek help from Smith’s fellow botanist Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society and influential in political circles as well, to say nothing of his role as unofficial director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. 

Correa must have had impressive language skills, because he was able to present papers in English as well as French and Portuguese.  Correa, through another of his correspondents, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, became interested in the natural system of plant classification as an alternative to Carl Linnaeus’s artificial classification system.  The latter was based on plants’ reproductive structures, making it easy to use, but it resulted in putting plants in the same class that differed greatly in other characteristics.  A natural system was built on a broader variety of traits, though specifically which traits should be considered was up for discussion.  The French botanist Michel Adamson, a generation older than Jussieu, had also worked on the same problem.  The British were less interested in natural systems, having been the first country outside Sweden to accept Linnaean classification.  Also, France and Britain were at odds politically, making French ideas less palatable. 

For Correa, the natural system made sense and he pushed that point in England, including by presenting a paper on the subject to the Linnean Society.  He interested a young Scottish botanist Robert Brown in the concept.  Brown was serving with the military in Ireland and using his free time to collect plants and investigate them.  He was in contact with James Smith and with the Linnean Society vice-president Jonas Dryander, and through them, not surprisingly, with Correa.  Brown had heard via this grapevine that Joseph Banks was searching for a botanist to accompany Captain Matthew Flinders on his planned circumnavigation of Australia.  Banks had approached Mungo Park, who had already led an expedition to Africa, but Park declined even after repeated urgings from Banks (Schwartz, 2021).  Brown was too self-effacing to contact Banks directly, so he asked Correa for an introduction and thus received a glowing recommendation.  The resulting expedition made Brown’s career in botany.  He collected prodigiously with the assistance of a gardener from Kew Peter Good and the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer, and he later became Banks’s librarian and keeper of his herbarium. 

Brown was grateful to Correa for his assistance, and when reporting to Banks during the trip, he always asked to be remembered to Correa.  When Brown published his list of Australian plants, including his own many discoveries, in Prodromus Novae Hollandiae (1810), he employed the natural classification system.  Correa used it himself in his work on citrus fruits.  In 1799, he read a paper at the Linnean Society in which he moved two genera of plants into a new, natural family called Aurantia renaming Crateva marmelos as Aegle marmelos (now in the Rutaceae) and Crateva balangas as Fermonia balangas; the name A. marmelos has held.  Correa was also interested in plants growing in water.  He presented a paper at the Linnean Society in which he argued that algae reproduced sexually.  He provided details of the observations of Johann Friedrich Gmelin and Joseph Gaertner, two German botanists, who took different views.  Then he presented his case, which was hardly correct in all its details since reproduction in algae wasn’t worked out until the middle of the 19^th century, but he made a number of astute observations.

Correa also wrote a fascinating paper on a “submarine forest” in Lincolnshire, this time to the Royal Society.  He and Banks went on a botanical excursion to this region on England’s east coast.  He describes an area where at low tide “islets” appear that are composed of tree trunks, roots, branches, and leaves, intermixed with aquatic plants.  There were a few erect tree trunks, but most had fallen over and were in various states of decay.  He was able to make out some of the species present including oak, birch, and fir.  There were other trees in the mix, but he admitted that he didn’t know enough about the comparative anatomy of trees to identify the other woods.  He also discussed how this area may have become submerged and suggested it might be due to land subsidence.  After reading this article it didn’t come as a surprise to learn that Correa had an interest in soil and geology; his knowledge in these areas is obvious here.  His depth of understanding seems to have allowed him to take advantage of new opportunities that opened for him, such as exploring the English seaside, and then eventually moving on to France.

References

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Schwartz, J. (2021). Robert Brown and Mungo Park: Travels and Explorations in Natural History for the Royal Society. New York: New York Botanical Garden Press.