DEATH OF DR BARCLAY 
57 
whether he still continued his medical studies, or 
had by that time entirely abandoned them for more 
congenial scientific work. 
In the preface to his Rapacious Birds, after 
mentioning his visit to London, he writes : “ Having 
been advised by a friend to engage in a kind of 
mineralogical speculation, I afterwards went to 
Edinburgh, where I had the advantage of hearing 
Professor Jamieson’s lectures.” Professor Jamie¬ 
son was then the occupant of the Chair of Natural 
History in the University of Edinburgh, and the 
above passage makes it clear that MacGillivray 
had by this time quite abandoned medicine, and 
committed himself definitely to natural science. 
Who the friend was on whose advice he went to 
Edinburgh does not appear, nor have we any 
information with regard to the result of the 
mineralogical speculation. It is, however, known 
that Mr Walter Berry of Edinburgh, Dr Barclay’s 
father-in-law, was then much interested in miner¬ 
alogy ; and it is not improbable that either he or Dr 
Barclay, if still then alive, was that friend. The 
precise date of his removal from Aberdeen to Edin¬ 
burgh, however, is uncertain, though it must have 
been either in the end of 1819, or beginning of 1820, 
in time to admit of his attendance on Professor 
Jamieson’s winter course of lectures. 
His friend and former medical instructor, Dr 
Barclay, died of typhus fever on 20th December 1819, 
in the twenty-seventh year of his age. That sad event 
affected MacGillivray very deeply, and he composed 
