1884.] OBITUARY NOTICE. 137 



Obituary. 



THE LATE ALEXANDER SHEARER. 



Mix. HHEARER was known to the older generation of horti- 

 culturists and estate improvers as the gardener of Lord 

 George, eighth Marquis of Tweeddale, whose agricultural improve- 

 ments at Tester, in East Lothian, have been so well chronicled by 

 Henry Stephens, author of the Book of the Farm. Mr. Shearer was 

 born at the mining village of Tranent, where his father was, in 

 English parlance, a colliery viewer. So the boy often descended 

 pits with compass and chain, thus having occasion to develop a 

 latent talent for civil engineering, for which he was distinguished 

 throughout his life. Whether in draining Danskine Loch, to place 

 the peaty bottom of which on the sandy soil of the neighliouring 

 fields, the Marquis designed a railway driven by a fixed steam-engine 

 and wire rope, or in carrying out extensive operations in planting 

 and road-making, extending across the wide domains from Yester to 

 Lauder, Shearer was the right hand of the executive. He is well 

 known in the horticultural world for his inventions in heating hot- 

 houses, carried out during his forty years' incumbency at Yester. 

 Meteorologists also remember him as taking charge for ten years of 

 Mr. Peter Stevenson's ingenious automatic recording machine, for 

 recording, by ten minutes' registrations, the daily temperature, 

 moisture, pressure, and rainfall, also one of the pet ideas of the late 

 Marquis, which failed because it needed a man like Mr. Shearer to 

 carry it on, and he could not be had. 



Mr. Shearer latterly engaged in practice as a consulting landscape 

 gardener and forester. In the latter capacity he was employed in 

 the famous case of Lord President Inglis against the Shotts Iron 

 Company, for deterioration of trees on the Glencorse estate by their 

 calcining operations. Mr. Shearer also gained great celebrity by 

 raising, by the aid of block, anchor, and tackle, a fine avenue of 

 large trees at Duns Castle, blown down by a great whirlwind a few 

 years ago. The trees continue to fiourish, and are indeed Shearer's 

 best monument. 



Mr. Shearer had been in but indifferent health for some months 

 previous to October 31st, when he succumbed to an attack of 

 paralysis, after a few days' illness, at the age of sixty-eight, leaving 

 a widow and married daughter, besides a large circle of Scottish and 

 English horticulturists, as well as other friends, to mourn his loss. 



