ISAAC BAYLEY BALFOUR, 
K.B.E., D.Sc., M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 
Emeritus Professor of Botany, University of Edinburgh. 
B OTANICAL science has sustained a severe loss through the death of 
Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour towards the close of last year. His life was 
one of great achievement, and his work has been fruitful in lasting results 
extending in many directions. 
He was born on March 31, 1853, and his early life was spent amid 
surroundings well fitted to encourage the full development of those fine 
qualities of mind with which nature had so richly endowed him. His father, 
John Hutton Balfour, was Professor of Botany in the University of Edinburgh 
and Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Gardens. His connexion with 
the University on his mother’s side goes back to a much earlier period, as his 
maternal great-grandfather, the Very Rev. George H. Baird, was Principal in 
the eighteenth century. He was educated as a boy at the Edinburgh 
Academy, a school which counts so many distinguished men amongst its 
alumni. He graduated in science and medicine at the University, and pursued 
botanical study and research at Wurzburg and Strassburg. He devoted him¬ 
self to botany from his early days, and those opportunities for gaining first¬ 
hand practical knowledge of horticulture which the Garden at Inverleith pro- 
vided were utilized to the full, and the foundations were thus laid of that 
profound knowledge of the horticultural side of botany which was to bear 
such rich fruit in after years, when he became not only a leader in the 
botanical world, but a recognized master of the craft of horticulture. No 
one who has read his masterly exposition of ‘ Problems in Propagation ’, 
which formed the subject of the Masters Lectures in 1912, can fail to be 
impressed by the breadth of his outlook combined with an astonishing 
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knowledge of the details of horticultural practice, a knowledge which is only 
too rare amongst the botanists of the present day. 
At the age of twenty-one he was chosen to accompany the Transit of 
Venus Expedition to Rodriguez, and a letter written by him from that 
island was judged to contain so much interesting and important matter that 
it was communicated by Sir Joseph Hooker to the Linnean Society. The 
full memoir, dealing with the flora of Rodriguez, was published in the 
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1879, and it established 
his position as a systematic botanist of the highest promise. 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XXXVII. No. CXLVI. April, 1923.] 
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