A Botanical Physiologist of the Eighteenth 
Century. 
BY 
FRANCIS DARWIN, F.RS. 
With Plates XLIV.—XLVI. 
British physiologists are justly proud of their great countryman 
Stephen Hales, and any evidence of the persistence of his in- 
fluence on the study of Botany in this country is of interest. The 
true spirit of experimental inquiry, as practiced by Hales, is 
evident in the interesting collection of drawings made for Pro- 
fessor Hope! of Edinburgh between about 1770 and 1785, which 
Professor Balfour has been good enough to place in my hands. 
I have also been allowed to see a manuscript volume containing 
John Hope’s Lectures. They are obviously written with zest, 
and are clear and vigorous. He makes frequent reference to the 
work of Hales, Du Hamel, Mariotte, Bonnet, and others, and 
marshals the facts he borrows so as to form interesting dis- 
cussions. But he is by no means solely dependent on the work 
of others; he is continually quoting his own experiments on 
growth in length and in thickness, on the ascent of water, on 
root pressure, on the much-discussed circulation of the sap 
(against which he argues forcibly), on the position assumed by 
leaves, on heliotropism, &c. The experiments are well devised 
and the results clearly given. The amount of his own con- 
tributions is sufficient to give an attractive atmosphere of 
originality to the whole. 
1 John Hope succeeded Charles Alston as King’s Botanist in Scotland, Regius 
Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, and Professor of Botany in 1761, 
and held these appointments until his death in 1786. For a time also the teaching of 
Materia Medica was attached to his botanical offices. An account of his life and work 
will appear in an early number of these ‘‘ Notes,” and here it need only be said that, 
as was the custom of his time, John Hope combined his botanical work with that of 
a Physician and teacher of Clinical Medicine, and consequently one might have 
expected that, like other botanists in his century in like positions, Botany as ancillary 
to Medicine ge Materia Medica would have sufficed as a field of his investigations. 
It is therefore all the more interesting to have the evidence which Mr. Darwin has 
sifted here, ar tice of life and response to factors of environment attracted 
him. —/. B. B. 
(Notes, R.B.G., Edin., No. XX, March 1909.] 
