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necessities that X should do so before the present audience ; for it is 
not we, but the Cape people who should erect a statue to him : to 
him, Charles D. Bell, who did, and accomplished, and suffered so 
much for them and amongst them, through all the best years of 
his long period of a most hard-working life and publicly useful 
career. C. P. S. 
William Robertson, lVI.JD. By George Seton, Esq., 
Advocate. 
Dr. William Robertson was born in Edinburgh on the 8th of 
January 1818. He was the eldest son of Mr. George Robertson, 
Keeper of the Records in H.M. General Register House, by Eliza 
Brown, his wife, sister to General Sir George Brown, of Crimean 
fame, and Mr. Peter Brown, well known as an agriculturist and 
land valuator in the north of Scotland. He obtained his early 
education at the Edinburgh Academy, from which he passed to the 
University ; and, after completing the medical curriculum, he con- 
tinued his studies at Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. In 1839 he 
graduated M.D. of Edinburgh, his Thesis being on Enlargement of 
the Heart,- which proved to be the disease from which he suffered 
prior to his death. Eour years afterwards he was admitted a 
Eellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He acted for some time 
as a physician in the Royal Infirmary, the Eever and Cholera 
Hospitals, and the Hew Town Dispensary; and, holding the 
appointment of Inspector-Physician of the British Civil Hospital 
at Renkioi, in virtue of the recommendation of Sir Robert Chris- 
tison, he served as a physician during the Crimean war. He was at 
one time editor of the Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science , 
to which he contributed several papers. On the resignation of Dr. 
Stark, in 1874, he was appointed to the post of Superintendent of 
the Statistical Department in the General Registry Office of Births, 
Deaths, and Marriages, having previously acted as Medical Registrar 
for Scotland. One of his latest official works was the preparation 
of the Report prefixed to the first volume relative to the Scottish 
Census of 1881. In 1876, on the death of Dr. Warburton Begbie, 
he became medical officer to the Scottish Widows’ Fund, having by 
that time gained large experience in matters connected with Life 
