Sir George King. 



Xlll 



relationship between the two men was perhaps more sympathetic after King 

 entered the University of Aberdeen in 1861 than it had been before. 



King's gift of lucid expression and his aptitude for business may, like his 

 instinct for literature and art, have been paternal inheritances. The origin 

 of his faculty for observation seems more obscure. It may have been derived 

 from the maternal side, for among his undergraduate contemporaries was 

 a relative,* in whom, as a boy, the love of natural history was also strongly 

 developed, though in this ' instance the capacity for close and accurate 

 observation was ultimately applied in a somewhat different field. 



How distinguished as a student King proved, may be gathered from the 

 fact that his contemporaries, after his first medical session, changed the old 

 agnomen " Tertius " to " Optimus." The improvement in health which had 

 begun in his eighteenth year continued ; he had still to exercise unusual care, 

 but the close of his university curriculum found him in more robust health 

 than at its commencement. His capacity attracted the attention of all his 

 teachers ; those who exercised most influence upon him were the Professors 

 of Botany (Dickie), Materia Medica (Harvey), and Anatomy (Struthers). 

 King attended Dickie's class in 1861, and in 1862, when Dickie was 

 incapacitated by illness, King was assistant to the deputy-professor, 

 Dr. Dickson.f In 1863, when Dickie resumed work, and again in 1864, King 

 continued to be assistant in the botanical department, and the attachment of 

 the two men only ended with the death of the gentle and distinguished 

 Dickie in 1882. The question as to the career King should adopt already 

 exercised his chief and himself. King's predilection was towards crypto- 

 gamic botany ; this was no doubt encouraged by so able an algologist as 

 Dickie, who applied for counsel to Sir W. J. Hooker. Hooker's suggestion 

 was that King should follow the example of his son, Dr. (now Sir J. D.) 

 Hooker, and join the Naval Medical Service. But, while studying Materia 

 Medica, Boyle's ' Manual ' led King to that author's other works ; these, with 

 Thomson's 'Narrative' and Hooker's 'Journal/ induced a desire to serve in 

 India. There seemed little hope of this, recruitment of medical men for India 

 having been suspended since 1860. But in April, 1865, the Indian Medical 



* Dr. James Rodger, whose father was an able mathematician and a successful man of 

 business, and whose mother was a sister of King's mother, was one of King's class-fellows 

 as a medical student. He graduated in 1865 along with King, and, like King, with 

 highest academical honours. An accurate anatomist and a sound j>athologist, Rodger 

 was Senior Demonstrator of Anatomy under Prof, (afterwards Sir John) Struthers at 

 Aberdeen from 1866 till 1871, and was Pathologist to the Royal Infirmary there from 

 1869 till 1886, when he was appointed a physician to the institution, and continued a 

 member of its staff until his death in 1900. But the evidence is not conclusive ; we must 

 assume that King's father was at least capable of appreciating his child's interest in 

 natural history, and we know that Rodger's father was an intimate friend of Pi-of. 

 Dickie, F.R.S., enjoyed a considerable reputation as a local botanist, and took a keen 

 interest in scientific matters generally. 



t Alexander Dickson, afterwards Professor of Botany at Trinity College, Dublin 

 (1866), Glasgow (1868), and Edinburgh (1879). 



