92 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



sciences, and which form a strong temptation to its ardent 

 students to know these and nothing more. He gradually 

 amassed a varied lore of interesting, practical, picturesque 

 facts regarding plants, which he used to draw from when 

 conversing with his more intimate friends and disciples ; 

 and he continued throughout life to treat himself and them 

 with the decoctions and ointments he made. In the 

 flower garden he formed afterwards at Droughsburn, he 

 cultivated such of them as did not grow wild, but were 

 required for his medicines. 



A few glimpses of John's utilization of plants in this 

 way may be both interesting and instructive. When I 

 first made his acquaintance in his eighty-third year, in 

 taking a walk with the bent, eager old medico-botanist, 

 as we passed the fig-wort (Scrophularia nodosa), he told 

 me how he had cured himself of a very painful affection 

 by means of a decoction of this plant and the common 

 dock, adding, with grateful energy, "Man, it wrocht like 

 a chairm ! Widna the doctors hae made a fine job o' 

 me ? " Throughout life, until his last illness, he would never 

 submit himself to a medical man's hands, believing rather 

 in his old friends, Culpepper, Tournefort, and Hill, than 

 in all the wisdom of the schools like all genuine herbalists, 

 whose condemnation of common practice is always uncom- 

 promising; and like the valiant Culpepper, who declares " the 

 College of Physicians too stately to learn and too proud 

 to continue." When Dr. Morrison of the Guise, in the 

 Vale of Alford, on one occasion urged him to take salts 

 and senna, then a universal cure, for some illness he had, 

 he replied, " Ay, that's the way ye do ye hunt it oot 

 and ye hunt it in. I'll gae to the chield at the gairden " 



