a- 
WILLIAM GARDINER AND GEORGE 
DON. 
TO THE EDITOR OF THE DUNDEE ADVERTISER. 
Sir, — Local botanists are greatly indebted tiok 
you for the excellent and lengthy report of 
President Druce’s address on Scottish botany, 
esp* jially with regard to George Don and his 
work. Too little is known about this Forfar 
“worthy.” The “Dictionary of National Bio- 
graphy” contains the lives of his two sons, but 
their greater father is not inserted either in 
book or supplement. The papers on Don’s life 
and work by Mr Druce and Mr John Knox, of 
Forfar, are buried in the somewhat inaccessible 
pages of the “ Scottish Naturalist,” and it is a 
great convenience to have the report in your 
pages. Don’s connection with Dundee is not 
sufficiently brought out, however. The parish 
of Muirhead, I presume, is Muirhead of Liff ; 
but the general impression here is that Don was 
bom in this city, where, as Professor Georg® 
Lawson wrote in “ Hogg’s Instructor” in 1852, 
his father followed the trade of a r Arrw. a.ftag*-. 
wards removing to Forfar. Don himself Lad 
many friends in Dundee; William Gardiner’s 
father and uncle botanised with him occasion- 
ally, and the “ Dundee Advertiser,” in its 
notice of Don’s death in 1814, says he was “ an 
honoivjry member of the Dundee Rational In- 
stitution,” a Society which did much towards 
cultivating a taste for literature andi natural 
science in the first decades of last century. Don ' _ 
has certainly suffered in the estimation of 
botanists from the fact that so many of hi* 
“ finds” have not been verified. Dr Walker- 
Arnott, of Glasgow, was probably the strongest 
objector. Hewett C. Watson, while inclined to 
put a fair amount of credence in Don’s state- 
ments, points out that so careful 1 a botanist a* 
William Gardiner has been unable to find tha 
stations of plants indicated by Don. Mr 
Druce’s examination of Don’s actual specimens 
must add to the weight of his testimony in Don’s 
favour. But the feeling of suspicion has long 
been abroad, although now and then we are 
gratified to see some of Don’s “ reputed finds,’' 
actually found in the places where he said ho 
discovered them. The following quotation 
from a MSS. by William Gardiner, the Dundeo 
botanist, may well see the light now, and may 
throw some light on the question. In Juno 
1831 Gardiner spent a week in botanising on the 
eastern coast of Forfarshire, and part of his 
“Journal” appeared in “Loudon’s Magazine oil 
Natural History” — the whole paper will bo 
found in the “Botanical Repository,” a manu- 
script magazine, now in the Lamb Collection in 
our Free Library. The extract I quote refers 
to Auohmithie : — “‘Mine hostess of the great 
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