104 KEW GARDENS 



tion of his schoolfellows by practising the then 

 young art of photography. Before reaching 

 school days, he had bought his first microscope. 

 Not yet out of his teens, he had what I had 

 heard called the best collection of beetles in 

 Scotland. About this time I accompanied him 

 and some older scientific adventurers on a 

 natural history expedition to the Bass Rock, 

 when, unfortunately, all the pundits were so 

 overcome by sea-sickness, that nothing could 

 then be added to the stock of knowledge. 



Macnab left our school in dudgeon against 

 a master who, having prescribed an essay 

 on starch, not unnaturally accused him of 

 plagiarising an elaborate composition based on 

 original experiment. From another school he 

 went early to Edinburgh University, and if I 

 am not mistaken, to Germany, where he used 

 his time so well that he had to wait some 

 months to come of age for taking his M.D. 

 degree at twenty-one. After a short digression 

 into lunacy practice, he followed his bent in a 

 professorship of Natural History at the Agri- 

 cultural College of Cirencester, and soon became 

 Botany Professor at the Royal College of 

 Science, Dublin. There he died prematurely, 



