28 PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 



need not say, that this healthy, vigorous patriarch of the present 

 Garden is held in much respect by all who know its great 

 age and the history of its travels. In the course of time 

 the Physic Garden became on many accounts unsuitable for 

 its purpose : an application was therefore made to Government 

 for removal to a more rural neighbourhood in 1763 ; the ap- 

 plication was favourably received, and in 1764 the Garden was 

 transferred to the head of Leith Walk, where a space of five acres 

 was leased by the Treasury on the property of the Professor of 

 Botany at the time, Dr. John Hope. Pennant, in his account of 

 his Tour in Scotland, in 1769, speaks in very favourable terms of the 

 state of the Garden, now become the iioyal Botanic Garden, as he 

 saw it only five years after its establishment. To him we are in- 

 debted for preserving the information, that the glass houses consisted 

 of a greenhouse of 50 feet, two stove-houses of 28 feet each, and two 

 temperate houses each of 12 feet — in all 130 feet ; and such was the 

 provision when I was a student of botany in 1813. It was a very 

 pretty garden in a really rural locality, situated immediately below 

 Haddington Place. But at the time it was occupied there were no 

 houses nearer it than the first four of Gayfield Place, and none on the 

 opposite side of the Walk at all, only nurseries, parks, and agricul- 

 tural fields. Soon after 1813 the students of medicine increased 

 greatly till at length they became nearly 1000. The science of botany 

 was making prodigious strides. The five-acre field, aud the little 

 class-room, had become wholly unsuitable. Hence, immediately on 

 the succession of the late Dr. Graham to the Chair of Botany, a great 

 effort was made to eff'ect another transference, and the result was the 

 purchase of a part of the present garden from Kochead of Inverleith, 

 and the transference from the old one in 1821 and 1822. It was a 

 slow and laborious process ; for no fewer than 1500 trees or shrubs 

 were removed from the one garden to the other, over a distance 

 of rather more than a mile ; and many of the trees were of great 

 size — one of them, I think the flowering ash, weighing with its ball 

 of roots and earth no less than nine tons. The transplantation was 

 attended with remarkable success. Only one tree of any importance 

 was lost, and very few were even injured. The new Koyal Botanic 

 Garden has been the pet of every one who has had any connection 

 with it, — of its professors and its superintendents, of the University, 

 of the Town Council, of this Society, of many distinguished citizens 

 besides, and of the Crown authorities both here and in London. In 

 consequence, it has only to prove its wants, and its necessities are 

 forthwith supplied. Thus its extent has been twice materially added 

 to, until it is now twice its dimensions in 1821. A magnificent palm- 

 house has been erected, and a large temperate house ; a museum has 

 been built, and a new class-room with appropriate rooms for practical 

 study ; and a fine building has been appropriated to the purposes of a 

 herbarium, which under the auspices of the University has now attained 

 a great magnitude. In every department the garden is in a flourish- 

 ing condition ; even the aged trees themselves seem to rejoice in the 

 surrounding prosperity, and renew their vigour." — The following 

 papers were read: ''Notes on an Excursion made by the Scottish 

 Botanical Alpine Club to the Aberdeenshire and Forfarshire mountains, 



