6 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
Dr Grant held numerous appointments of a clerical nature. He 
was a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission of Edinburgh, and 
was its Chairman up to about six months before his death. He 
was in 1841 appointed Chaplain to the Highland Society, and 
retained that office to the last. He was an Honorary Member of 
the Harveian Society of Edinburgh, and was its Chaplain for fifty- 
five years, having been appointed in 1844. In 1888, at the 106th 
Festival, the Society revived the title of Pontifex Maximus , which 
had been in abeyance since the time of Dr Grant’s predecessor the 
Rev. Dr Moodie, and conferred it on its venerable Chaplain, who 
had but rarely missed a meeting during his long incumbency. Dr 
Grant was a genial man, though with a dry manner, and was much 
respected and esteemed by all who knew him. 
By the death of Dr James Matthews Duncan, British Medicine, 
especially in the departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, lost 
one of its foremost men, and a blank has been left in the ranks of 
the profession which will not easily be filled up. 
Dr Matthews Duncan was born in Aberdeen in 1826, and in that 
city he received his early as well as his academic education. He 
graduated there as M.A. in 1843, and in 1846 he took the degree of 
M.D. He subsequently studied Medicine in Edinburgh, bestowing 
special attention on the subject of Midwifery ; and thereafter he 
went to Paris in pursuit of further knowledge in his own special 
department. He was for some time a private assistant to Sir 
James Young Simpson, but unhappily a quarrel arose between these 
two distinguished men, which led to their alienation. Duncan there- 
after settled in practice in Edinburgh, becoming a Fellow of the 
Royal College of Physicians in 1851, and two years afterwards he 
commenced to deliver lectures on Midwifery and the Diseases of 
Women and Children, which, although at first kept in the shade by 
the renown and name of Simpson, soon began to show enough of 
brilliancy to attract an earnest though not large class of students. 
His reputation among his professional brethren, and subsequently 
with the public, led to his acquiring a large and important practice ; 
and on the illness and subsequent death of Simpson, he unques- 
tionably stood at the head of the Obstetric Physicians of Edin- 
burgh. This naturally led, when Simpson died, to the general 
belief that he would succeed him in his chair ; but the fact of 
