Harvey et al. (1996), 30, list a single sheet ‘Coleoptera for and from the British Museum, 1893’ in the NHM. (MD 12/01)

Musgrave (1932) records that Brown was a botanist who visited Australia as naturalist on board the Investigator commanded by Captain Flinders. He left England in 1801 and was in Australia until 1805. He visited the Islands in Bass Straits, the settlements of Port Dalrymple and Hobart in Tasmania, and the Hawkesbury, Hunter and Williams River Valleys in New South Wales. He made collections of insects which were described by W.S. Macleay (1819), W. Kirby (1818) and W.E. Leach (1819). These included Coleoptera, and Kirby named Cetonia brownii after him.

A photocopy of a typescript of the early minutes of the local Society, in Norwich Castle Museum, records that Brown gave (?) a collection of beetles in 1835. (MD 12/01)

Educated at Magdalen School, Oxford and St. Peter Hall, Oxford. His early contributions to entomology were primarily concerned with the taxonomy, distribution and ecology of aquatic insects, especially Corixidae and other aquatic Hemiptera in many parts of the British Isles and in the Faroe Islands. Later he became interested in insect migration too, and it is these subjects which dominate his extensive list of publications. Perhaps his best known work on the Coleoptera was The Aquatic Coleoptera of North Wales, published by the Society for British Entomology in 1948.

At the time of his death in Tenby from apoplexy, Brown was Manager of the Burton, Uttoxeter, and Ashbourn Bank, a position he had held for twenty five of the forty two years he had been connected with the bank. He was interested in all branches of natural history, and was recorded to have had enormous stores of treasures, geological, zoological and botanical, British and exotic, which he kept in a large room adjoining his house.

Mentioned by Johnson & Halbert (1902), 542, as a collector of Irish Coleoptera. (MD 12/01)