A New York state botanist, interested in mosses and ferns, Austin was successively lecturer, teacher, collector, landscape gardener and once curator of plants for John Torrey at Columbia University. His collecting was done primarily in Central New York, New England and New Jersey. In L. D. von Schweinitz' Specimen Florae Americae Septentrionalis Cryptogamicae, 1821, on page 8, he writes: “I have on the margins, under Schweinitz's name placed what I conceive to be the correct names of the species as represented in Herb. Torrey,” signed C. F. A. Two short writings are inserted: (1) “Schweinitz's Hepaticae,” (with explanatory notes to numbers 2-58 in part) and (2) “Hepaticae in Herb. Torrey.”