History of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. 
BOTANICAL EXCURSIONS 
MADE BY 
PROFESSOR JOHN HUTTON BALFOUR, 
IN THE YEARS FROM 1846 TO 1878 INCLUSIVELY. 
BOTANICAL excursions have always been a prominent feature 
of the teaching of Botany in Scottish Universities. There is no 
record of when these were instituted in the case of the Edinburgh 
Chair of Botany, which is the oldest in Scotland, but Sutherland, 
who was the first professor, tells us in the dedicatory epistle of 
his “Catalogue of the Plants in the Physical Garden at Edin- 
burgh,” published in 1683, that “by many painful Journeys in all 
Seasons of the year” he had made it his business to “recover 
whatever this Kingdom possesseth of Variety, and to cultivate 
and preserve all of them with all possibie Diligence.” It is not 
unreasonable to suppose that on some of his journeys he may 
have been accompanied by some of those who attended his 
lectures in the Garden, and that therefore journeys made in the 
first instance for the purpose of obtaining plants to stock the 
Garden, became in time a recognised method by which students 
of botany in Edinburgh received an insight under guidance to 
the vegetation and flora of their native country. 
To what extent the Prestons, Alston, Hope, and Rutherford, 
the successive professors following Sutherland, made excursions 
with their students I have no information. But amongst 
Professor Hope’s papers which are now in the possession of the 
Royal Botanic Garden, is a “Calendarium of Plants growing in 
the neighbourhood of Edinburgh collected in flower, 1765, as a 
— R.B.G., Edin., No. VII., 1902.) 
