Ohituary Notices. 
XXXV 
He was a profound mathematician, an able and accomplished 
scientist and experimentalist, and as a linguist it would be hardly 
too much to say that he was facile princeps of all the philologists 
who ever lived ; for there was scarcely a language spoken on earth 
which he did not know and could not speak. It was to the training 
of such a man that Dr Keiller was now entrusted. His affections 
were drawn out towards his teacher, and almost the last of his 
public acts was to pay a loving tribute to the great merits of 
Lindsay in a paper which he read as lately as last August before 
the British Association, by showing that he was among the first, if 
not the very first, who invented the Electric Telegraph, and had 
actually worked one of his own construction between Dundee and 
the coast of Fife j and that he also successfully experimented on 
electricity as a source of lighting. 
Contact with such a genius could hardly fail to inspire a like 
enthusiasm and perseverance, though these, in the case of this pupil, 
were directed into other channels, and must have done much to lay 
the foundation of his after success and eminence, both as a careful 
observer and skilful inventor. Some time after the death of his 
father, Mrs Keiller removed wuth her family to Edinburgh, and took 
up her abode for some years in Adam Square. 
Before commencing his medical studies at Edinburgh, young 
Keiller had shown a strong bias to anatomical pursuits, and might 
have been found, when fifteen or sixteen years of age, at the Earthen 
Mound (as it was then called), sitting for hours together under a 
temporary shelter, and by means of an old book on Anatomy 
studying the various human bones which he had picked up from the 
loads of rubbish which from time to time, since 1782, had been laid 
down during its formation. With a proclivity so marked, we are 
prepared to learn that when, in 1830, he attended the lectures of Dr 
Knox, who was then at the zenith of his popularity, Keiller became 
a favourite pupil, and that that distinguished anatomist augured 
well regarding his success in that science. 
After taking the diploma of the Royal College of Surgeons in 
1833, his neatness of hand and proficiency in anatomy doubtless 
commended him to Dr A. Jardine Lizars, an able and successful 
teacher of that science in the Argyle Square Medical School, who 
afterwards became Professor of Anatomy at Aberdeen, and Dr 
