242 
always used. When the new and larger Western District School 
was erected in 1884 he was promoted to its charge, and he 
remained there until his retirement in 1911, having completed 
forty-five years of active teaching. He was an eminently suc- 
cessful teacher ; took a leading part in all that concerned his 
profession, and, for many years a prominent citizen of the “Fair 
City," in manifold ways he earned the esteem and regard of his 
fellow-men. 
As a field botanist of distinction Barclay was known in this 
country to a wide circle of friends and correspondents, while his 
special knowledge of the genus Rosa brought him into touch 
with numerous continental rhodologists. Naturally the bulk of 
his work centred round his own district of Perth, and he was 
intimately associated with Dr. Buchanan White in the collection 
of material for a “Flora” of the county. This appeared as 
White’s “ Flora of Perthshire,” in 1898, four years after the death 
of the author. The volume was prepared for publication by the 
late Prof. J. W. H. Trail, whose acknowledgment of the help he 
received from Barclay is stated in the Introduction. 
Barclay’s first contribution to Perthshire Botany was an 
account of the plants of “Woody Island” — in the river Tay 
above Perth — published in 1887 in the Transactions of the Perth- 
shire Society of Natural Science, a society in which he always 
took a prominent place, being president for eleven years. This 
early paper was followed by others on the “Flora” of the Tay 
basin, and in 1912 he issued (Proc. Perth. Soc. Nat. Sci.) a useful 
supplement to the “Flora,” giving the additions to the county 
list for the preceding twenty years. 
There have been field botanists with a greater number of 
“ discoveries ” to their name ; these attractions made little appeal 
to William Barclay. He never went into the field in search of 
them. The discovery of two plants, however, stands to his credit : 
Poa palustris L. in the marshes of the Tay in 1889, and the 
hybrid Potamogeton venustus Baagoe in the Earn in 1915. 
Barclay’s special work concerned the genus Rosa, on which 
he became an acknowledged authority 7 , but he was not of the 
school of “ splitters.” Not that he failed to make a minute study 
of this polymorphic genus, but rather, perceiving so much in- 
dividual variation, he found it impossible to define limits, unless, 
indeed, individual plants themselves were to be accepted as such. 
And this was the criticism he made of much of the continental 
work on the genus, — that authentic specimens collected by the 
authors themselves neither agreed with the original description 
nor with one another. From the vast amount of Bose material 
