Aprit 1907.] PATRICK BLAIR, SURGEON APOTHECARY, 273 
They found that they had both been working upon a “new 
method” by which to classify plants, founded upon “the 
seed-leaves ”—cotyledons, we now call them. Blair tells 
his friend all he knew, the experiments he hopes to make in 
the spring. A reference by Martyn to some observations of 
Cesalpinus (d. 1603), “ giving the first hint of the circulation 
of the blood, upon which Harvey afterwards so handsomely 
enlarged,” leads the Doctor to write, “that this has frequently 
been seen in a great many discoveries made within these 
three hundred years in Natural History, where the hints 
have been given by one, enlarged by another, discovered by the 
third, and still greater improvements made by the fourth” ; 
and then he goes on to show how previous vegetable anatom- 
ists had given hints as to the “sexes of plants,’ “but Dr. 
Nehemiah Grew was he who made the full discovery.” Their 
own experiments on this subject are then discussed, and 
he advises that the Zychnis tribe be “strictly examined by 
you and all your other acquaintances.” This letter, he says, 
is the first he has “written in his newly formed greenhouse,” 
which, in its way, was used as his laboratory, much as that 
still more famous greenhouse at Down, in Kent. 
I do not know what practice or income Dr. Blair made for 
himself in Boston. He writes hopefully, and apparently 
he had no desire to follow the example of his friend Dr. 
Arbuthnot, to whom he dedicated his book on the Elephant. 
Arbuthnot worked away for a time at Dorchester, until 
one fine morning he mounted his horse and left the place in 
sheer disgust. “No one would die there,” he said, “and he 
could not live in it.” Blair did, however, live in Boston, and 
evidently made the most of it. The flats of Lincolnshire, its 
sands and seashore, reminded him of the- other “ Holland” 
of his earlier years; the teeming bird-life of fen and shore 
gratified his love for ornithology, and gave him opportunity 
to add to his young friend Martyn’s collection. And it is 
not the least pleasant aspect of those later days of Dr. Blair’s 
that his regard for this “amiable youth” was as sincerely 
returned; Martyn, amongst other services to his friend, 
revising Blair’s proofs for his London printers. 
Dr. Blair had high hopes of the work Martyn would do. 
“ Tf you live to see the number of years I have done,” he wrote 
him, “I rejoice at the thought of your own contributions to 
