Roland W. Brown

Brown was born in 1893. In 1928 he was appointed as a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, where he remained until he retired in 1958. He also served as a Research Associate in the Department of Geology of the United States National Museum, starting from 1951 till his death in 1961. He studied a lot of Cenozoic and Mesozoic plants.[1].

Roland Brown also was a linguistic scholar and is widely known among taxonomists for his book, "Composition of Scientific Words" [2], originally published in 1927 under the title "Materials for Word-Study" and reprinted in 1954, 1965, 1978, and 1985 under the latter title. It provided a large number of taxonomists in the Twentieth Century with the ability to coin new names of taxa (species, genera, families, etc), facilitating the conservation of the world's biodiversity.