24 
THE JOUEXAL OF EOT AST 
Favoured by birth as the son of a noted botanist, and by the 
scientific surroundings of Edinburgh during a great period of its 
history, he made a brilliant start in life. After graduating in Edin¬ 
burgh he studied in two German universities, and in the intervals he 
acted as assistant to Huxley and to Lister: while still a mere youth 
he deputised during illness for his aged father in the Edinburgh 
Chair. Before he was 30 years of age he had made two expeditions 
to Oceanic Islands (Rodrigues and Socotra), and described hundreds 
of species new to science. He had also produced an admirable mono¬ 
graph of the genus Halophila , which showed that if he cared to 
pursue it, morphological analysis was a natural field for him. Many 
a young man would have entered some such restricted channel and 
have pursued it; but Balfour took a wider view. His life has been 
a remarkable record of reconstruction. He spent it in reorganising 
with the truest insight the factories of science, in the faith that 
others would use them after him in feeding the broad stream. 
His appointment in 1879 to the Regius Chair in Glasgow, in 
succession to Dickson, gave him his first opportunity. In the brief 
-years he was there he secured the rebuilding of the main range of 
plant-houses at the Botanic Gardens, the rescue of the Kibble house 
from military bands and performing dogs, and its establishment as a 
winter garden. He had almost achieved the purchase of the house 
that is now Queen Margaret College as a botanical institute when an 
adverse wave of popular opinion swept his scheme away. His work 
in the University was no less vigorous. Youth, enthusiasm, and 
mastery of his subject at once brought a healthy tone into his class¬ 
room. He saved the valuable but neglected herbarium from destruc¬ 
tion by beetles. He bartered the old lecture hall for two rooms 
suitable as a student’s laboratory for the practical classes which 
he initiated; and thus he provided himself and his successor with a 
grievance that could only be set right by new buildings, such as now 
exist. When I succeeded him in 1885 I found the machinery in 
working order, and it only needed to be kept running. 
Translated in 1885 to Oxford, he set himself to reconstitute the 
ancient garden and the Botanical Institute, which had fallen into 
disorder and decay. But the feature which specially marked his 
short tenure at Oxford was the establishment of relations with the 
Clarendon Press. Gathering round him a group of botanists, he 
induced the Press to found the Annals of Botany, a quarterly journal 
now of world-wide repute, of which the 36th volume is in progress. 
The fact that, though profusely illustrated and sumptuously pro¬ 
duced, it has paid its way is in itself a witness to his business 
capacity. The Press also at his instigation issued a long series of 
translations of foreign treatises which at that time were necessary 
for botanical study in English-speaking countries. Balfour himself 
translated several of them, and edited them all. 
Still a young man of only thirty-five years, he was promoted in 
1888 to his father’s Chair in Edinburgh, and to the Keepersliip of 
the Royal Gardens, with the title of King’s Botanist for Scotland. 
Following Dickson in Edinburgh as he had in 1879 in Glasgow, he 
again galvanised a nerveless regime into vital activity. He came 
