Robert Brown discovers and names the cell…

Robert Brown discovers and names the cell nucleus in a paper dated 1828.

In a paper read to the Linnean society in 1831 and published in 1833, Brown, the leading British botanist to collect in Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century, names the cell nucleus.

The nucleus had been observed before, perhaps as early as 1682 by the Dutch microscopist Leeuwenhoek, and Franz Bauer had noted and drawn it as a regular feature of plant cells in 1802, but it is Brown who gives it the name it bears to this day (while giving credit to Bauer's drawings).

Neither Bauer nor Brown thought the nucleus to be universal, and Brown thinks it to be primarily confined to Monocotyledons.