HOPE'S PHYSIOLOGICAL TEACHING 289 



plants. His own ardour and enthusiasm impressed others, and 

 his pupils in all parts of the world contributed to making the 

 Garden a renowned collection of the rarest plants. Here Hope 

 met his students, and here he carried out his many physiological 

 experiments which gave them instruction. 



His teaching was comprehensive. Although no longer tied 

 by the calls of his Materia Medica, Hope did not ignore the 

 subject entirely, but plants in this relation were not the ground- 

 work of his instruction. Systematic and descriptive Botany, 

 recognition of herbs, still found a place in it. In Alston the 

 most strenuous opponent of the Linnaean method had gone ; it 

 found in Hope a no less strenuous advocate, to whose influence 

 its rapid adoption in this country owed much. To what extent 

 Hope made excursions with his pupils, there is no evidence. 

 His Hortus Siccus and lists of plants with localities show that 

 he was a field-botanist, and in correspondence with, if not more 

 intimately acquainted with, the botanists who were working out 

 the Scottish Flora at the period such men, for instance, as 

 Lightfoot, Stuart, Robertson. This we do know, that he 

 encouraged his pupils to investigate the Flora of Scotland, 

 giving yearly a gold medal for the best Herbarium, and Hope's 

 " peripatetic pupils " is a designation met with in literature of 

 the time. This aspect of Hope's teaching, consonant with the 

 features of the botanical literature of the period, is that which 

 has been commonly known. It is not however a complete 

 picture. In Hope Scotland had a physiologist of originality and 

 skill who was not only informed upon the work of Hales, 

 Duhamel, Mariotte and others, but who made his own experi- 

 ments, clearly devised and effective, and whose catholicity is 

 attested by his dealing with such problems as growth in length 

 and thickness, effect of light and gravity, movement of water, 

 healing of wounds, and the like. This physiology was an 

 essential element of his teaching, and the effect upon students 

 of contact with such direct wresting of truth from Nature must 

 have been immense. Our knowledge of all this, only recently 

 acquired, throws a new light upon Hope's character, and upon 

 the influence which he appears to have exercised on the 

 education of the time. The pity is that he left no published 



o. B. 



