Notwithstanding the early date of the foundation of the College of Physicians of London, and the fact that the illustrious names of Harvey and Sydenham and others adorn the rise of rational medicine in the south, the credit of first developing a famous medical school belongs to Edinburgh, where the Monros, Gregorys, Cullen, Black, and Rutherford maintained during the eighteenth century an unbroken succession of brilliant names. It cannot be allowed, however, that the Town Council of Edinburgh, in founding medical professorships, deserves as much of this credit as do the outside founders of medical teaching, whose existence and success extorted from the municipality a recognition formal and limited at first, and certainly unremunerated. It may be questioned whether the University of Edinburgh has not really been indebted almost as much to the extra-academical teachers of medicine who have continually stimulated the actual professors to their best endeavours, as to those professors themselves. Anatomy, the necessary foundation of medicine, had a kind of beginning in Edinburgh in 1505, for the surgeons and barbers of the city had procured the insertion in their charter of a clause enabling them to obtain “once in the year a condemned man after he be dead to make anatomy of.” But little came of this, and it was reserved for a number of able physicians, educated abroad, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, to set on foot some practical teaching in medicine and the allied sciences. The names of Sir Robert Sibbald, Sir Andrew Balfour, and Sir Archibald Stevenson must be honourably mentioned in this connection. The first two of these were most influential in establishing the earliest public botanic garden in Edinburgh, a piece of ground about forty feet square, belonging to Holyrood House. They subsequently allied to themselves James Sutherland, who afterwards became a notable botanist, and obtained the appointment of keeper of a much larger garden near Trinity College Church. Many valuable collections of seeds and plants were procured; medical students were incited to collect and send home seeds and cuttings from places they might travel to; and so the garden became an important starting-point for materia medica.