554 
Notes . 
taken from his herbarium, or living ones from the garden when they 
were to be had, together with samples of the drugs or other products 
which they yielded. I may add that this collection, which he presented 
to Kew, was the germ of the three museums of economic botany, the 
first ever established, that are such important features of the Royal 
Gardens. 
It remains to allude to the class excursions, which have always 
been, and still happily are, a prominent feature of the botanical 
teaching in the Scottish Universities. Of these there were three : 
two, on Saturdays, were habitually to Campsie Glen and Bowling Bay 
respectively. The third, which was eagerly looked forward to by 
the most ardent of the students, took place at the end of June, during 
what was called the ‘preaching week,’ when the lecture-room was 
closed. It was to some good botanizing ground in the western 
Highlands. As many as thirty students have taken part in one of 
these larger excursions, each provided with as small a kit as possible — 
a vasculum, and apparatus for drying plants. They were often 
accompanied by students from Edinburgh, and sometimes by eminent 
botanists, British and foreign. In those days there were few inns 
in the western Highlands, and fewer coaches, and the roads were 
bad. On one of my father’s first excursions to some mountains 
beyond the head of Loch Lomond he provided a marquee holding 
thirty persons, which was transported in a Dutch waggon by a High- 
land pony ; and for supplies the party depended upon the flocks and 
fowls of the cottagers. On the first upon which I was taken as a boy, 
to Ben Lomond, there was no inn at Tarbet, and we all slept there 
in our clothes, on heather spread on the floor of a cottage. On 
another occasion when I was allowed to join the party (more for 
fishing than for botanizing) on an excursion to Killin, we walked 
the whole way from the head of Loch Lomond along the old military 
road made in the previous century by General Wade, eulogized in 
the well-known distich : 
‘ If you’d seen these roads before they were made, 
You’d have lift up your hands and blessed General Wade.’ 
If I were asked what I regarded as of most importance to the 
student in the manner of my father’s teaching as sketched above, 
I would answer that it taught the art of exact observation and reasoning 
therefrom — a schooling of inestimable value for the medical man, and 
one that is given in no other profession, but which ought to come, 
