366 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
tion of which and of their original provenance he hoped to determine the 
prevalent oceanic currents in the area. 
It was fortunate for biological science that Bruce preserved his wide 
sympathies throughout life, and refused to be drawn into the narrow path 
of the specialist. The expeditions in which he took part and which he 
planned afforded unique opportunities of observation and of collecting on 
broad lines, and these he used to such advantage that he stands in the 
first rank of the great naturalist travellers. No man in recent years has 
done more to enrich, in variety as well as in numbers, the accumulated 
stores on which the science of systematic zoology is based. 
How much Bruce might have accomplished had he been free to 
follow the lines of special investigation of animal life he had planned 
for himself it is difficult to say, for the task of gathering specimens was 
perhaps the least onerous part of his labours, and, with a generosity 
that was characteristic of him, he spent many years and grudged no pains 
in the sorting and grouping of his enormous wealth of material, so that 
each specialist might enter upon the last stage of detailed classification 
free from the drudgery of the initial unravelling. 
To glance more closely at some of the results of Bruce’s biological 
labours. Botany, geology, and zoology have one and all been enriched 
through his energies. The recent floras of Gough Island, the isolated 
volcanic islet midway between South America and South Africa, and of 
the South Orkney Islands, were described for the first time by Dr R. N. 
Rudmose Brown — the former as the result of the first scientific exploration 
of the island, made during the return voyage of the Scotia ; and the plants 
obtained there, together with representatives of the cryptogamic floras 
of the Antarctic islands and seas he visited, form, according to Professor 
Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour, late Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden in 
Edinburgh, one of the most valuable collections deposited there in recent 
years. His careful botanical collecting in Prince Charles Foreland added 
much to the knowledge of the flora of Spitsbergen. 
In spite of the fact that numerous geological surveys of Spitsbergen had 
preceded Bruce’s visits, it was he who first discovered that Prince Charles 
Foreland was not wholly of Lower Palseozoic formation, as had been asserted ; 
and Dr G. W. Lee’s examination of his fossil collections proved that Bruce 
was right, and that over the Lower Palaeozoic formations there lay in places 
on the east coast deposits representing Tertiary strata. 
But it was on zoology that Bruce’s main efforts were concentrated, 
and scarcely a branch of the science, especially in its systematic and 
biological aspects, but is the richer for his travels. 
