296 THE EDINBURGH PROFESSORS 



administration of the Royal Botanic Garden in his hands, as 

 well as the calls of his Professorship of Botany to attend to. 

 But Balfour was untiring in industry, prompt and precise in 

 method, and administrative work appealed to him. 



Though liable like his predecessors to undertake clinical 

 medical teaching, Balfour, save for occasionally acting as locum 

 tenens, took no share in it, and his energies in teaching were 

 devoted to Botany. On the lines he followed he was pioneer. 

 We have seen that Field Botany had been for several decades a 

 characteristic of the Edinburgh Botanic School. Whilst main- 

 taining this feature, Balfour added laboratory work. The word 

 " laboratory " was not then in vogue, and " microscopical room " 

 was the designation of the new domain in which the "guillotine," 

 not the "microtome," was used. In the sphere of practical 

 teaching this was a notable advance, and the more so when the 

 technical difficulties that had to be overcome are remembered 

 the days of cheap microscopes were but beginning, aniline dyes 

 were not yet. Nevertheless the student of the time had oppor- 

 tunity were he so minded of examining plant-form and plant- 

 structure for himself under direction, and if the equipment for 

 work were not so perfect mechanically as modern methods now 

 permit of, the training in minute observation was no less ex- 

 cellent than that of to-day, and the educational effect of the 

 teaching no less valuable. The scheme of work was that of the 

 text-books passing progressively from tissues to organs vege- 

 tative and reproductive both phanerogamic and cryptogamic. 

 The specialisation of the type system had not come. 



Before he was able to establish, as he did in the early fifties, 

 practical laboratory classes, Balfour had introduced a system of 

 demonstrations of microscopic objects and of physiological 

 experiments in illustration daily of the subject of his lecture, 

 and it is testimony to his power of infusing zeal in pupils that 

 there was always a contingent of them ready to come to the 

 Botanic Garden at six o'clock in the morning to give voluntary 

 aid in the arranging of these demonstrations for the lecture at 

 eight o'clock. Many of those who came have recorded that they 

 found that period and its work one of the most inspiring in 

 their student history. 



