23 
o f Edin burgh , Session 1875-76. 
entirely at variance with those generally held ; but he never would 
concede that he was in error. 
He was very partial to natural history, and wrote upon “ The 
Structure of Fishes,” “ The Unity of Organisation, as exhibited in 
the Skeleton of Animals,” and “On the Vertebral Homologies, as 
applicable to Zoology.” 
In the year 1849 he accepted an appointment to that somewhat 
anomalous professorship of “Civil and Natural History” in St 
Andrews, but I am not sure whether he ever had any students. 
He had formed a large and interesting collection of specimens 
in natural history and anatomy. 
Principal Shairp informs me that, a few years before his death, 
Dr Macdonald made over this collection to the University Museum. 
Donald Mackenzie became a Fellow of this Society in 1870. 
He was born 19th June 1818, and died 17th May 1875, at Nor- 
wood, near London, where he had gone on account of ill health. 
Though born in Edinburgh, his father was from Sutherlandshire, 
and a Captain in the Royal North British Fusiliers. His mother 
was Robina Jamieson, one of the seventeen children of John 
Jamieson, D.D., who wrote the well-known Dictionary of the 
Scottish language. 
Donald was the eldest of seven children, all of whom he survived, 
though he, too, died at the comparatively early age of fifty-seven. 
At first he studied for medicine, and received the degree of 
M.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1838. He was also a 
Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. 
But he abandoned that profession, and came to the Scottish bar, 
influenced, it is believed, by the expectation that as his uncle, 
Robert Jamieson, advocate, had a large amount of practice in the 
Courts, he would be able to give him a lift. Robert Jamieson I 
remember well in the Parliament House, being the most con- 
spicuous figure there for height and breadth, and a lawyer of great 
acuteness. His sister, Donald’s mother, lived to the age of eighty- 
four. 
Donald, to whom this notice refers, did not inherit the Jamieson 
constitution. He was narrow-chested and slim, but walked with 
elastic step. 
