His teaching was comprehensive. Although no longer tied by the calls of his Materia Medica, Hope did not ignore the subject entirely, but plants in this relation were not the groundwork of his instruction. Systematic and descriptive Botany, recognition of herbs, still found a place in it. In Alston the most strenuous opponent of the Linnaean method had gone; it found in Hope a no less strenuous advocate, to whose influence its rapid adoption in this country owed much. To what extent Hope made excursions with his pupils, there is no evidence. His _Hortus Siccus_ and lists of plants with localities show that he was a field-botanist, and in correspondence with, if not more intimately acquainted with, the botanists who were working out the Scottish Flora at the period--such men, for instance, as Lightfoot, Stuart, Robertson. This we do know, that he encouraged his pupils to investigate the Flora of Scotland, giving yearly a gold medal for the best Herbarium, and Hope's "peripatetic pupils" is a designation met with in literature of the time. This aspect of Hope's teaching, consonant with the features of the botanical literature of the period, is that which has been commonly known. It is not however a complete picture. In Hope Scotland had a physiologist of originality and skill--who was not only informed upon the work of Hales, Duhamel, Mariotte and others, but who made his own experiments, clearly devised and effective, and whose catholicity is attested by his dealing with such problems as growth in length and thickness, effect of light and gravity, movement of water, healing of wounds, and the like. This physiology was an essential element of his teaching, and the effect upon students of contact with such direct wresting of truth from Nature must have been immense. Our knowledge of all this, only recently acquired, throws a new light upon Hope's character, and upon the influence which he appears to have exercised on the education of the time. The pity is that he left no published records, and that this bright period of brilliant research should have become obscured by the scholasticism inherent in the method of classification which he himself did so much to popularise.