684 
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
OBITUARY NOTICES. 
George Barclay. By Dr George A. Berry. 
(Read March 20, 1911.) 
George Barclay was born in 1820 and died on November 24, 1910, having 
nearly completed the first half of his ninety-first year. For the last seventy 
years his associations had been entirely with Edinburgh, where he came to 
reside from his native Aberdeenshire. 
In Aberdeenshire the name of Barclay is one of the oldest in the county. 
George Barclay’s grandfather was the lineal representative of the Barclays 
of Tollie. His father, Dr George Barclay, attained great distinction in his 
profession. Though only twenty-seven at the time of his death, which 
occurred some months before his son George’s birth, he was the recognised 
authority on surgery in the north of Scotland, and the first to occupy 
the post of Lecturer on Surgery in the Aberdeen University. William 
Macgillivray, the naturalist, published for private circulation a long elegiac 
poem on the death of his friend and teacher, the cutting short of whose 
brilliant career was looked upon in Aberdeen as a public calamity. 
George Barclay retained a vivid recollection of the old customs and 
school fights at the ancient Grammar School of Aberdeen. There he was a 
pupil of the famous Melvin and a class-fellow of the late William Garden 
Blaikie. With Blaikie he not only divided the first Greek prize and won 
the coveted “ silver pen,” but shared the distinction of obtaining the first 
place on leaving Marischal College with its degree of M.A. 
In 1848, after some years spent in Belgium and Germany, and before 
settling down as a partner in the business firm of his uncle in Leith, 
Barclay undertook a journey to the Holy Land — somewhat of an enterprise 
at that time, and, as his experience showed, attended with some risk. The 
homeward journey led him through Rome, where in those turbulent days — 
the year of the revolution — he narrowly escaped imprisonment, or worse, 
through the prank of a companion, who set the great bell of the Capitol 
tolling, a bell which was never heard except on occasion of great public 
emergency. He often subsequently visited Rome, in whose historical and 
artistic associations he, as an accomplished linguist and scholar, took the 
deepest interest. Equally at home in France and Germany, his sojourns 
