Part 46

During the whole tenure of his offices Graham devoted himself to the affairs of this Garden, and often in the very practical way of supplying funds from his own resources to supplement the inadequate grants obtained from Government. It gave him the material for the description of many new species which were figured in the Botanical Magazine and other like periodicals. This systematic botanical work was that which Graham cared for most, it was the backbone of his teaching, and all of his scattered papers deal with this aspect of the subject.

In connection with his teaching Graham developed specially the botanical excursion for the study of Field Botany, making it an integral part of his courses, and in furtherance of its aims travelling far through Scotland--a business of a much more arduous nature in days when railways and motors had not annihilated distance and provided all the comforts of civilisation within easy reach of every district. Graham had intended to publish a Flora of Scotland as the result of his practical study of its plants, but it was uncompleted at the time of his death in 1845 after an illness of some duration during which (Sir) Joseph Dalton Hooker acted as locum tenens.

Another new method in his teaching was that of encouraging students to write essays upon subjects either practical or theoretical. In this he stimulated investigation. Students in these days had more time than they have now to devote to such things, and of their efforts some were sound pieces of research--the Botanical Geography of Hewitt C. Watson first took form in one of these essays.

John Hutton Balfour, who succeeded Graham, was born in Edinburgh 15th September, 1808. The eldest son of Andrew Balfour, surgeon in the Army, who afterwards settled in Edinburgh as printer and publisher, in which business his enterprise was adequate to the venture of the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia under the editorship of (Sir) David Brewster. Andrew Balfour was a grim old presbyterian of the stuff covenanters were made, and in the strict home environment which he created young Balfour early came into touch with theological dogma. The echo of these early impressions remained with him throughout life.

Educated at the High School of Edinburgh where he laid the foundation of sound classical scholarship--always his unobtrusive distinction--Balfour entered the curriculum for the Arts degree at the University. Before completing this he migrated to St Andrews in order to be under the influence of Professor Thomas Chalmers--the famous Divine, afterwards leader in the disruption that founded the Free Church of Scotland--in conformity with the desire of his father that he should become a minister in the Church of Scotland. But Divinity did not claim him and he returned to Edinburgh to begin the study of Medicine--a decision in face of family pressure which is tribute to the strength of purpose which characterised him and found expression frequently in after life.

At the beginning of this renewed Edinburgh curriculum Balfour attended the Botany course of Professor Graham in 1825, and obtained his first scientific instruction in Botany--a subject for which he had always shown fondness. Robert Dickson, afterwards Lecturer on Botany at St George's Hospital, London, was a fellow-student, and together they, in this and following years, made many botanical excursions about Edinburgh. With his fellows Balfour seems to have been bon camarade, acquired all the ephemeral distinction attaching to a facile writer of rhymed couplets for occasions, and as an inveterate maker of puns was in demand for the office of punster at the convivial clubs of the period. A mark of more serious attainment--he was President of the Royal Medical Society in two years. After graduation as M.D., when he also became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh--his thesis for the former being "De Strychnia," for the latter "On Purulent Wounds"--Balfour went in 1832 to Paris to continue his medical education, studying there under Dupuytren, Lisfranc, and Manec. Returning, he settled in Edinburgh in 1834 and entered on practice, becoming assistant within and without the University to Sir George Ballingall, Professor of Military Surgery. Amongst his patients he numbered De Quincey and his family. De Quincey's eldest son died from a cerebral complaint, and the autopsy revealed an interesting pathological condition which formed the subject of Balfour's investigation, and an account of it his first published scientific paper.

From the claims of Medicine Balfour could wrest little time for botanical pursuits, but his holiday always meant the botanical exploration of some area, preferably alpine, and his home became a centre for men of kindred tastes. There in co-operation with his old teacher Graham, and with Greville, Forbes, Falconer, Parnell, Munby and others, was instituted in 1836 the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, with wide aims for the promotion of Botany--amongst them the creation of a botanical library and a herbarium. This has proved a signal service to science. It was the pegging out of a claim which has been made effective. The Society after a life--as with all such societies--of fluctuating periods of greater and lesser activity, flourishes still, and its library and herbarium, transferred to the Crown when the space demand of their bulk became urgent, have been the foundation for the large botanical library and herbarium now maintained and subsidised by Government in the Royal Botanic Garden.

Plants gradually drew Balfour away from patients and in 1840 he carried the divorce so far as to establish himself as a teacher of Botany in the Extra-mural Medical School in Edinburgh--that exemplar of free-trade in teaching--from which so many of the famous occupants of Chairs in the University have entered its portals. But only in 1842, when Sir William Hooker moved to Kew and a vacancy was then caused in the Glasgow Chair of Botany to which Balfour was elected, was he able to give up medical practice entirely.

In Glasgow the first years of Balfour's botanical career were spent, but they were few. On the death of Graham he returned to Edinburgh as Professor of Medicine and Botany and Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden--the electors passing over Joseph Dalton Hooker also a candidate. In the sphere of these offices the rest of his active life was passed until his retirement in 1879. He came to the University of Edinburgh at a time when the reputation of its medical school was upheld by a remarkable band of teachers in the Medical Faculty--Allen Thomson, Alison, Christison, Goodsir, Gregory, Jameson, Simpson, Syme--and when the struggle of the University after a revised constitution was approaching the climax reached in 1858, when with other Scottish Universities Edinburgh obtained autonomy, and science was enfranchised. Of this Faculty he became Dean, and held office until close upon the time when he became Emeritus. In all the discussions and controversies, destructive and constructive, that attached to so weighty a crisis, Balfour's influence and outlook for science were used with effect, and no less influential were his action and advice in subsequent years when the specific question of medical reform was raised, as it so often was.

Absorbing administrative work of this kind, to which were soon added the duties of a Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh--(and he remained in the Secretariat to the end of his active life)--as well as those of an editor of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal--(afterwards merged in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History)--of Secretary of the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society and of other offices, made inroad alike upon time and energy of a man who had also the administration of the Royal Botanic Garden in his hands, as well as the calls of his Professorship of Botany to attend to. But Balfour was untiring in industry, prompt and precise in method, and administrative work appealed to him.

Though liable like his predecessors to undertake clinical medical teaching, Balfour, save for occasionally acting as locum tenens, took no share in it, and his energies in teaching were devoted to Botany. On the lines he followed he was pioneer. We have seen that Field Botany had been for several decades a characteristic of the Edinburgh Botanic School. Whilst maintaining this feature, Balfour added laboratory work. The word "laboratory" was not then in vogue, and "microscopical room" was the designation of the new domain in which the "guillotine," not the "microtome," was used. In the sphere of practical teaching this was a notable advance, and the more so when the technical difficulties that had to be overcome are remembered--the days of cheap microscopes were but beginning, aniline dyes were not yet. Nevertheless the student of the time had opportunity were he so minded of examining plant-form and plant-structure for himself under direction, and if the equipment for work were not so perfect mechanically as modern methods now permit of, the training in minute observation was no less excellent than that of to-day, and the educational effect of the teaching no less valuable. The scheme of work was that of the text-books--passing progressively from tissues to organs vegetative and reproductive both phanerogamic and cryptogamic. The specialisation of the type system had not come.

Before he was able to establish, as he did in the early fifties, practical laboratory classes, Balfour had introduced a system of demonstrations of microscopic objects and of physiological experiments in illustration daily of the subject of his lecture, and it is testimony to his power of infusing zeal in pupils that there was always a contingent of them ready to come to the Botanic Garden at six o'clock in the morning to give voluntary aid in the arranging of these demonstrations for the lecture at eight o'clock. Many of those who came have recorded that they found that period and its work one of the most inspiring in their student history.

This new departure in teaching did not interfere with the continuation and extension of field-work, which up to this time had been the form of practical study cultivated in Edinburgh. On the contrary the Botanical Excursion gave Balfour an outlet for energy and favourable opportunity for the exercise of those gifts of personal magnetism and intellectual stimulus through which he influenced and guided many generations of students. Every Saturday during the summer session an excursion was made, and one of some days' duration usually brought the session to a close. Through these excursions the greater part of Scotland was traversed--on one occasion the terminal excursion of the session was to Switzerland--and the features of flora and vegetation were brought to the attention of many hundreds of students.

The aim and result of the excursion were not solely the acquisition of plants and their identification. The stimulating effect on many of this side of Botany is evidenced even in our day by the zeal with which search after rare plants is pursued, and in the eagerness displayed in the race after micro-forms. But the enticement of acquisition and discovery of novelty whilst there were not the governing influences in Balfour's excursion. In touch as he was with the problems of organography in its fullest sense, a man of wide reading familiar with the botanical work of his time, and associated as he had been in the field with men like Edward Forbes and Hewett Cottrell Watson, Balfour could and did look at plants from the standpoint of their place in vegetation, and in relation to the conditions of growth, and as having a history in their habitat. His teaching reflected this. It was never classification, diagnosis, and nomenclature as the end-all of Botany. The details emphasised changed as the progress of botanical discovery gave new clues to explanation of form and relation, and it was the solvings and attempts at solvings of observed phenomena that gave that fascination to his excursions, the remembrance of which seems to have clung to those who had the fortune to join them. The succession of plants and plant-form from base to summit of a highland hill; contrasts of vegetation of stream-course, mountain pasture, alpine rock; high mountain forms of shore plants; intrusion and extirpation; factors of distribution and their influence;--those and other problems of what we now term Ecological Botany were themes on which the Professor discoursed in his rambles, filling the pupil with information and forcing him to think out to such conclusion as he might on the evidence before him. And then the whole occasion was so enlivened by the outgo of good humour and mirth in joke and pun and story, that fatigue and weariness, which the physical exercise might evoke in those less attuned than the wiry Professor, were drowned in the sunny current of humanity.

I mention this practical teaching first, for it was the characteristic feature, but the idea of practical illustration pervaded all Balfour's effort. His lecture table became a synopsis of the lecture--living plants, herbarium material, museum specimens, all were pressed into service to elucidate the points of the discourse, whilst the walls were tapestried by diagrams. Never did teacher more sedulously absorb the new for presentation to his pupils. He was a lucid expositor, and, apart from his University lectures, during many years was sought after for more popular discourses to non-academic audiences.

The period of Balfour's teaching included the momentous year 1860. The impulse of the new spirit introduced by Darwin did not stimulate Balfour as it might have done a younger man. His religious beliefs--always in evidence--were showing then the influence of his early environment, and whilst Darwin's work was incorporated in his teaching, the acceptance of Darwin's theory appeared too near the negation of faith. On Balfour indeed, as on others with like views, the immediate effect of the Origin was the opposite of vivifying. It gave a shock. And this, I conceive, not so much a consequence of Darwin's own statement of his theory as of the forceful uncompromising attitude of the chief protagonist of his cause. Arrogance there was on the religious side, but no less also on the scientific side in the discussion. Perhaps it was well that the contest was sharp and bitter. It ended sooner, but its course was strewn with misconceptions and with confusion of cause and effect. In our days of complete reconciliation, when every tyro lisps in phyletic numbers as the outcome of Darwin's work, it is not amiss to recall the struggle at its inception--lest we forget.

The system of Essays which formed so important a part of Graham's teaching remained as prominent and was even developed further in Balfour's course in a way which had the inestimable merit of making the student feel that his study of plants had a living relationship with the everyday concerns of life. Thus when Simpson was engaged in his epoch-making investigations on anaesthetics, the subject for an essay was the effect of anaesthetics on sensitive plants, and by way of emphasis, the prize awarded was a gift by Simpson himself. Similarly Balfour enlisted the sympathy of Messrs Lawson, the prominent agricultural nurserymen of the day, and their prizes for dissection of grasses, for kinds of cereals, and like subjects, were constant reminders of the relations of botanical study to agriculture. The subjects of essays covered a wide field. The titles--influence of narcotic and irritant gases, changes which have taken place in the Flora of Britain during the historical era, cytogenesis and cell development, phanerogamous embryology, cryptogamous reproduction, teratology--may serve to indicate this, and an essential was always the practical illustration, microscopic or other.

For the use of the students Balfour compiled text-books which, like his lectures, are comprehensive in the field they cover, and encyclopaedic in the information they convey. His facile pen found expression too in numberless articles in encyclopaedias and magazines, and his activity as an expositor of botanical topics of the time was unbounded.

In the Botanic Garden Balfour obtained the material for the definite contributions he made to natural knowledge which are in the domain of Systematic Botany. No work in which Balfour engaged gave him more genuine pleasure than the administration of the Botanic Garden. Entering on the responsibility of its care when its repute was high, he left it on laying down office in even higher reputation, for in the McNabs--William and James--father and son--he had lieutenants of the first rank in gardening. During his regime the equipment for laboratory teaching to which reference has been made was installed, a museum to which old pupils all over the world contributed was instituted, and the Garden itself trebled in size, the latest addition, made just before his retirement, being an area to be cultivated as an arboretum for students of Forestry--a subject then beginning to claim attention.

With Balfour's retirement in 1879 the link of Botany with Medicine in the University was still further weakened. Medicine was left out of the title of the Chair to which Alexander Dickson succeeded.

Alexander Dickson of Hartree and Kilbucho was born at Edinburgh, 21st July, 1836. He was the second son of David Dickson of Hartree in Peeblesshire, and the representative of a family for long lairds of the estates of which, by the early death of his elder brother, he became proprietor. Educated privately, he entered the University of Edinburgh as a student of Medicine, graduating in 1860. Before graduation he had studied in Würzburg and in Berlin, particularly under Kölliker and Virchow, and after it he embarked on the stream of medical practice in Edinburgh. But that was convention--a demonstration of brass plate. His means placed him beyond the necessity of such professional work. His instinct lay in the direction of discovery of method more than in its application. During his student days he had shown a keen interest in Botany. Before graduation he had written on botanical subjects, and his thesis on graduation "The development of the flower in Caryophyllaceae" witnesses to his obsession. Whilst waiting for patients, he had continued work on embryogeny in plants, and when in 1862 the ill health of Professor Dickie at Aberdeen required the appointment of a substitute, the selection of Dickson set seal to his claims as a professed Botanist. In 1866 he succeeded Harvey as Professor in Dublin. Thence in 1868 he was translated to Glasgow as successor to Walker-Arnott, and in 1879 became Professor of Botany and Queen's Botanist in Edinburgh on the retirement of Balfour, and, holding these positions, he died in 1887.

Dickson's passion was not teaching, and his success is testimony to the quality of the man. He was adored by his students, as could not well be otherwise with a man of his geniality and kindliness; he took immense pains over his lectures, spending hours daily over the making of fresh drawings on the blackboard for his classes, holding that a student would copy a temporary sketch although he would not copy a permanent wall-diagram; the lecture itself was a model of scientific presentment; at excursions he was untiring in demonstration and in fruitful suggestion, and he was always ready to give of his best to his pupils; but his real love was for research and he carried out many organographical investigations which have added to the sum of natural knowledge. His record in published papers far exceeds that of any of his predecessors, and the quality of his work recalls that of Irmisch. Flower-morphology, embryogeny, teratology, were the subjects to which he gave most attention in research, and in them he obtained results of solid and permanent value. For a time the subject of phyllotaxy occupied him, but it is not a fruitful theme although it gave him opportunity for showing his power of clear analysis; much more interesting was his subsequent work on pitcher plants of kinds.

Dickson possessed great skill in manipulation, and was strikingly effective in the use of his pencil in artistic delineation of the objects of his investigation. Careful in his work he took endless pains to secure that accuracy which it always shows. Further, his subject is always illumined by the comparative method of treatment which his wide knowledge and sound critical faculty enabled him to bring to bear upon it.

The duties of his lairdship were no light ones to Dickson who had set himself to build up again what had come to him in an impoverished condition, and affairs of Church and State were a very real interest to him. Amidst all these ties, to which has to be added the administration of the Botanic Garden, in which during his tenure a new and enlarged Lecture Hall was built, he found time to cultivate the musical faculty for which he was distinguished; not only was he a pianist of mark, but he found absorbing zest in the collecting of national airs sung by the peasants of Scotland.

In the line of Professors of Botany in Edinburgh no one ranked higher in distinction than Alexander Dickson, with whose name I conclude this sketch.

FOOTNOTE:

His portrait forms the frontispiece of this book.

SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER