Character and description of Kingia

Character and description of Kingia, a new genus of plants found on the south-west coast of New Holland, with observations on the structure of its unimpregnated ovulum, and on the female flower of Cycadeae and Coniferae is a paper published in 1826 that was written by Robert Brown. Though nominally it contains a formal description of the formerly unpublished Kingia, it is more notable for its digressions into the anatomy and development of plant ovules, in which Brown sets out for the first time the modern understanding of angiosperm ovules, and publishes the first description of the difference between angiosperms and gymnosperms. Of the latter, it is said that "no more important discovery was ever made in the domain of comparative morphology and systematic Botany".

Background
Brown had known of Kingia for many years, having collected several specimens in 1800. However, early specimens lacked good fruiting material, making it impossible to determine its systematics, so no attempt was made to formally publish it. Publication was not initiated until 1823, when Allan Cunningham requested that Brown named a plant after Philip Gidley King, who was the governor of New South Wales during Brown's voyage to the area, and Phillip Parker King, Philip Gidley's brother. Cunningham provided a list of potential plants, which included Kingia. A year later, William Baxter sent Brown some specimens of the ripe fruit of the tree, and Brown set off to writing a description.

As Brown often did, he took the opportunity to some obliquely related material that he had been working on for a while, possibly as early as 1809. Partly as a result to this, the production of the paper was delayed, and by 1825, there was concern that the paper would be replaced by Cunningham's, A few general remarks on the vegetation of certain coasts of Terra Australis; however, Brown's paper was read to the Linnaean Society in November the same year, and appeared in print in 1826 as a preprint. The official publication officially occured in 1827, in the second volume of Phillip Parker King's Narrative of a survey of the intertropical and western coasts of Australia performed between the years 1818 and 1822.

Content
The paper was divided into three parts. A treatment of Kingia came first, with the genus being formally described and named after the Kings, and tentatively placed in the Liliaceae. It then follows a detailed description of the ovule of Kingia, which acts as a bridge to the other two parts.

In the second part of the paper, Brown sets down for the first the modern view of anatomy and development of angiosperm ovules. He describes the standard arrangement in the angiosperms. David Mabberley described this section as "a remarkably clear exposition of one of the most intricate and misunderstood areas of developmental anatomy in higher plants."

The third part of the paper is the discussion of the "female flower" of cycads and conifers. In it, Brown sets out for the first time the fundamental difference between angiosperms and gymnosperms, mainly saying that pollen grains are drawn into the ovule by gymnosperms, while in angiosperms, contact is made by pollen tubes. This was a very important discovery. In 1890, Julius von Sachs said that "no more important discovery was ever made in the domain of comparative morphology and systematic Botany". That Brown was able to observe the ovule of a gymnosperm at all is remarkable, given the difficulty of finding the same with a more modern microscope.

Publication details
It was first published in 1826 as a preprint. The paper appeared the following year in Phillip Parker King's Narrative of a survey of the intertropical and western coasts of Australia. It was later republished in Volume 67 of the Philosophical Magazine, and in several of separate reprints, including one in which it was paired with Cunningham's A few general remarks on the vegetation of certain coasts of Terra Australis. In 1827, a French translation appeared in Annales des Sciences Naturelles, and German translations were published three times in in 1827 and 1828 in Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck's Robert Brown's Vermischte botanische Schriften, then in Linnaea, and finally in Isis. In 1866, John Joseph Bennett's, The miscellaneous botanical works of Robert Brown.

Legacy
Despite its importance, Brown's article received very little attention at first; for example, reviewers of Phillip Parker King's book took little notice of it. Over time, however, more attention was received. It took some time for the homologies to be fully worked out, but ultimately, the work laid the foundation for a great deal of work; for example, Wilhelm Hofmeister's work on alternation of generations.