OBITUARY NOTICE— REV. GEORGE GUNN 155 



always conscientiously and faithfully performed. He did not 

 allow his other interests to draw him away from his main 

 work. He visited his people assiduously, and was very 

 attentive to the sick, at whose bedsides his ministrations 

 were greatly valued. He was a model parish minister, and 

 the bond that united him to his people was of the closest 

 kind, as was manifested by the enthusiasm with which the 

 twenty-first anniversary of his ordination was celebrated by 

 all classes, and still more by the universal sympathy that 

 went out towards him in his last illness, and the grief that 

 threw the whole parish into mourning at his death. He 

 will be long remembered in Stichill as a faithful minister 

 and as a constant friend. 



In this short memoir particular notice should be taken of 

 his scientific studies and attainments. He had not received 

 any proper scientific education in his earlier years. When 

 he was at college his private teaching occupied all the time 

 he could spare from his professional studies. But in the 

 greater leisure of a country parish his scientific tastes rapidly 

 developed, and he availed himself of every opportunity of 

 adding to his knowledge. He was surrounded by nature in 

 his new home, and interesting natural objects of all kinds 

 thrust themselves upon the observation of the young man 

 fresh from a city life. The woods of Stichill and Newton 

 Don, the wayside flowers, the mosses on the walls, the 

 quarry on the borders of his glebe, the old castle of Hume 

 with all its historical associations, equally appealed to his 

 new-born sense of curiosity and wonder. He began to 

 turn his attention to botany, geology, and archaeology, not 

 studying them, however, very systematically, rather adding 

 fact to fact as his daily observations supplied the material. 

 He would have been the first to disclaim any pretension to 

 authority in any of these sciences. He worked simply as 

 a field-naturalist, whose ear was open to the varied voices 

 of Nature around him. It was nature in the concrete that 

 he loved and studied, nature as it presented itself in the 

 manifold objects around him. It was plants that interested 

 him rather than their morphology, and rocks rather than 

 theories of their formation, and by constant use of his oppor- 

 tunities he gradually acquired a very considerable knowledge 



