In one of the short notices which have been published of the traveller’s life, it is stated that the “family of Clapperton is ancient, and not without celebrity in the north of Scotland. The name,” it is added, “has been distinguished both in the church and in the field; and in proof of this we are told that a Bishop Clapperton is buried in the island called Inchcolm, in the Firth of Forth; while another individual of the same name is mentioned in the history of Sweden as having been a field-marshall in the army of that country. We cannot tell whether the prelate or the soldier is to be regarded as belonging to the family whence the African traveller was descended; but it unquestionably was highly respectable, both in point of antiquity and of its station in society. His grandfather, Robert Clapperton, was a doctor of medicine, whose professional studies were pursued by him first at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards among the hospitals in Paris. On his return to his own country he married Miss Elizabeth Campbell, a near relation of Campbell of Glenlyon, and settled at the town of Lochmaben, in Dumfries-shire, as a medical practitioner. He is said to have been a good classical scholar, and much attached to the study of antiquity; and while he excelled in the tracing of genealogies, in the collecting of coins and songs, with the view of illustrating border history, he was highly esteemed as a skilful physician. He had two sons, the younger of whom chose the army as his profession, and is now a lieutenant-colonel of marines; but George, the elder of the two, adopted that of his father; and having previously obtained an adequate professional education, he settled as a surgeon in the town of Annan, Dumfries-shire. He was long the only medical practitioner of repute in that place; and the numerous operations and cures which he performed proved the means both of increasing his practice and extending his fame. While still young, he married a daughter of Johnstone of Thornythwaite, by whom he had fourteen children, Hugh, who afterwards became the African traveller, being the tenth. The mother of this numerous family, who is described as beautiful, amiable and accomplished, died in the thirty-ninth year of her age, leaving behind her seven sons and a daughter, Hugh being the youngest of these surviving sons, and consequently a mere infant. And to enhance the greatness of the bereavement which he had sustained in the loss of his mother, his father speedily afterwards married a second wife, whom his friends regarded as a woman of inferior station to that which he and his family occupied. At the time when this second marriage took place, most of the sons had left their father’s house, to engage elsewhere in the active pursuits of life, and the girl had been taken away by her mother’s relations; but the subject of this memoir and some of his younger brothers, were left at home to encounter the