Thomas Brown (minister and natural historian)

Thomas Brown FRSE (1811–1893) was a Scottish minister in the Free Church of Scotland who rose to its highest rank, Moderator of the General Assembly in 1890. He was a noted geologist and botanist. He wrote prolifically on the history of the Disruption of 1843.

Life

He was born on 23 April 1811 in the manse at Langton, Berwickshire in south-east Scotland, the son of the Rev John Brown, minister of that parish.

He trained in theology at Edinburgh University and began working as a minister in 1837 at Kineff in Aberdeenshire. He left the Church of Scotland at the point of the Disruption of 1843. He spent some years without a ministry before being placed in the relatively prestigious Dean Free Church in north-west Edinburgh in 1849. He remained in the Free Church of Scotland for the rest of his life, serving as its Moderator in 1890 and the age of 79.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1861. His address was then listed as 16 Carlton Street in Stockbridge, Edinburgh.

Edinburgh University honoured him with a Doctor of Divinity in 1880.

He died in Edinburgh on the 4 April 1893.

Family

He married Miss Wood, sister of physician Alexander Wood, in 1848. Their children included the physician and neurologist, John James Graham Brown (1853–1925).

Publications

See

• Botany of Langton – part of the New Statistical Account of Scotland, 1834
• A Sketch of the Life and Work of Alexander Wood MD FRCP (1886)
• Commentary on the Gospels (1854)
• Church and State in Scotland, 1560 to 1843 (1891)
• Annals of the Disruption (1893)
• A History of Berwickshire Nationalist Club (proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1893)