50 HISTORY OF THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDEN. 
his duties. This successor was George Don, who is known to 
posterity, not for his work as Principal Gardener of the Botanic 
Garden, where his career was not a long one, but as a botanist of 
acute perception and as an able investigator of the Scottish 
Flora. The friendship between Mackay and Don, which 
brought Don to Edinburgh and to the Botanic Garden to visit 
him, would furnish opportunity to Professor Rutherford of 
becoming acquainted with Don, and of realising the great 
knowledge of British plants he possessed and his practical 
acquaintance with gardening, and these would be strong recom- 
mendations in favour of his selection for the post of Principal 
Gardener when it became vacant. As matter of fact, Don did 
not enter upon the duties of Principal Gardener until mid- 
December of 1802, and it was only on 24th October of that 
year that Brodie of Brodie, who interested himself in Don’s 
appointment, wrote to Sir James E. Smith telling him of it. 
Even allowing for some delay after the event in the penning of 
this letter, there must have been a considerable interval between 
Mackay’s death and Don’s appointment. Why was this? In 
the light of after-history may we not construct a picture of, on 
one side, Rutherford, tempted by Don’s qualifications as a 
botanist and gardener, yet hesitating to appoint one whose 
independence and wilfulness, showing, as one must believe, in 
Don’s every feature and action, gave scarce promise of content- 
ment under control ; and, on the other side, Don, wrestling with 
himself over the value of his freedom and doubtful of the 
wisdom of entangling himself in the trammels of the routine of 
a subordinate and ill-paid official post which would enforce 
banishment from the open-air life amongst the plants on the 
hills to which he had become used. Whether this be right or 
wrong, certain is it that Don’s advent as Principal Gardener was 
long delayed, and it is significant that when he did come to 
Edinburgh he did not give up his Forfar garden, That, as we 
are told, he left under the care of his father and to it he returned 
when, whatever the cause or causes, he quitted the Botanic 
Garden after some three or four years’ service in it. 
I had accumulated with other material for a History of the 
Royal Botanic Garden some facts for a memoir of George 
Don, when | heard from Mr. G. Claridge Druce that, following 
