CHAPTER XXVIII. 



DUNCAN'S GENERAL STUDIES IN LATER YEARS. 



DURING the twenty-nine years John Duncan stayed at 

 Droughsburn, he pursued much the same studies as 

 formerly. 



In Theology, he was as keen as ever, keeping up his 

 reading on biblical subjects, intelligently following the 

 religious and ecclesiastical questions of the time, and 

 watching, in particular, the fortunes of the Free Church 

 and the career of its leaders with unabated interest. 



His Astronomical studies seem to have been greatly 

 swamped by Botany. He still used his dials and pocket 

 timepiece, watched the heavens, and talked about them to 

 interested friends. 



Meteorology he still continued to inquire into and 

 practise. From 1865 to 1869, for example, he recorded 

 observations on summer temperature, and in 1876, in his 

 eighty-second year, he purchased a new kind of "storm 

 glass." 



He never went into Ornithology, as his friends Charles 

 and James Black and William Beveridge did. But with his 

 observing eyes, in his wanderings amidst the special haunts 

 of our rarer birds, he gathered much more than a common 



