266 PATRICK BLAIR, SURGEON APOTHECARY.  [Szss. Lxxr, 
to make a top dressing for some of the fields in Strathmore, 
and so the “ poor beast” of Blair’s narrative got back to earth 
again. The Physic Garden also has vanished; no trace of 
it can be found, unless it be that some of the plants which 
Dr. Blair told Petiver he required—and most probably 
got—as they were not to be had in this neighbourhood, 
are the progenitors of those which now are come across 
in and around Dundee.t This loss of the Garden is a 
pity, for, as Professor Bayley Balfour writes me, “The 
interest in the Dundee Garden -lies in this, that it would be 
one of the earliest founded in Britain. Oxford is first, then 
Edinburgh (1670), next would come Dundee.” Other papers, 
anatomical, botanical, and surgical, were contributed to the 
Royal Society by Blair, and in 1712 he was elected an F.R.S., 
an honour he ever highly esteemed, and tried, by his natural 
history work, especially botanical, to maintain. In the many 
letters which passed between Petiver and himself, and which 
now form part of the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum, 
the Doctor is a very interesting and likeable figure. Con- 
cerned about some botanical and pharmaceutical MSS. of his 
which are in Sloane’s hands, which he (Sloane) seems to think 
highly of, and which have had the approbation of Dr. George 
Preston, Professor of Botany, at Edinburgh, “will they 
likely be taken up by the publishers?”” Unfortunately, Mr. 
Ray’s books were a glut in the market, and no bookseller 
would look at other books in Latin on Botany. It was 
disheartening, and Mr, Petiver’s suggestion that they should 
1 By the formation of Whitehall Street in 1883, an early residential 
part ot Dundee was largely destroyed. In this closely packed block of 
buildings, extending from Crichton Street on the east to Couttie’s Wynd 
on the west, many of the leading families of the town had their resi- 
dences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Closes intersected 
the block, passing down from Nethergate to Fish Street. Sometimes 
the pathway was open lo the sky; at others the way led through dark 
arched passages under the houses. In Scott’s Close there was a low- 
roofed passage some 40 feet long. Covering halt the length of this was 
across house of one storey, while over the rest of the passage was an 
open space which at one time had been a garden. “The ground for 
this overhead garden had been rich loam for the cultivation of flowers, 
although latterly it became merely a trodden platform” (Lamb’s “ Old 
Dundee”). The Dr. Patrick Blair of 1625 (see ante, p. 264) possessed 
property in this quarter, and it is possible that here was the “ physic- 
garden” of his descendant. Only an enthusiast like the later surgeon- 
apothecary would have been at the pains to make use of so unlikely 
a site. 
