This botanist by birth and birthplace was a schoolfellow of mine, whose early career deserves notice. His masters could have seen little promise in such a scholar, for, under the _régime_ then styled education, our lessons simply did not interest him, and I often wondered how he picked up the _quantum_ of Latin necessary for his medical examinations. But at fourteen he printed a monograph, either on ferns or on seaweeds, of which I had a copy but cannot lay hands on it. At the same age he gave a lecture on plant life, illustrated by diagrams prepared by himself. He also excited the wondering admiration of his schoolfellows by practising the then young art of photography. Before reaching school days, he had bought his first microscope. Not yet out of his teens, he had what I had heard called the best collection of beetles in Scotland. About this time I accompanied him and some older scientific adventurers on a natural history expedition to the Bass Rock, when, unfortunately, all the pundits were so overcome by sea-sickness, that nothing could then be added to the stock of knowledge. Macnab left our school in dudgeon against a master who, having prescribed an essay on starch, not unnaturally accused him of plagiarising an elaborate composition based on original experiment. From another school he went early to Edinburgh University, and if I am not mistaken, to Germany, where he used his time so well that he had to wait some months to come of age for taking his M.D. degree at twenty-one. After a short digression into lunacy practice, he followed his bent in a professorship of Natural History at the Agricultural College of Cirencester, and soon became Botany Professor at the Royal College of Science, Dublin. There he died prematurely, else his life would surely have figured on some more authoritative pages than mine. The last time I saw him, if I remember right, he was staying at Kew, engaged in some work or study in the Gardens where his grandfather had been foreman. The above digression relates to the fact that the Kew gardeners were apt to be kinsmen, or at least kindly Scots. Macnab, Lockhart, Begbie, Kerr, Fraser, Morison--these are only some names occurring early among the staff to show how the Aiton dynasty did not overlook their countrymen’s claims to employment.