196 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW 



XXIV. 



THOMAS HOPKIRK OF DALBETH : A Sketch 

 of his Life and Botanical Work. 



BY ROBERT TURNER. 



[Read 27th January, 18S5.] 



Thomas Hopkirk of Dalbeth was in his day the 

 most distinguished of our local botanists. He was 

 a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the 

 Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, and of several 

 other kindred bodies. This serves to mark the inter- 

 est which he took in science; but it suggests little 

 of that enthusiasm which, for a great part of his 

 life, made the study of plants a passion with him 

 rather than a pastime, and the wonders of the vege- 

 table world his chief delight and recreation. He 

 was a botanist, and yet something more than a 

 botanist— he was a devoted flower-lover. Mere col- 

 lections of plants dead and dried did not satisfy him. 

 In those old-world times before Waterloo had been 

 fought, he gathered round his home by the Clyde 

 plants native and alien by the thousand. His garden 

 at Dalbeth became the nursing mother of what is 

 now the Glasgow Royal Botanic Garden, and it is 

 mainly owing to that zeal of his some seventy years 

 ago that we have today anything more about Glas- 

 gow illustrative of Natural History than useful dry- 

 as-dust museums of dead creatures, preserved or 

 petrified. 



The object of this sketch is mainly to put on record 

 something bearing on his work, before all remem- 

 brance of him passes away; but I shall also attempt 

 to estimate the amount of difference that has arisen 

 in the Flora of the district since his time, and to 



