David Laing the well-known antiquary, requesting a free ticket for some sucking sawbones. Barclay professed himself delighted to confer the favour, but invited his proposed pupil to accompany him to Mr. Laing’s shop, where he selected books on anatomy to the exact value of his ticket, and sagely remarking that without text-books his lectures were useless, presented them to the astonished youth as a gift from Mr. Laing! Taking no denial he bundled the youth and the books out of the place. He did not again find it necessary to repeat the lesson. In Sir Robert Christison’s _Life_ some remarkable instances are given of this curious form of benevolence at somebody else’s expense, but the subject need not be pursued. Barclay had collected a considerable museum, of which a fine elephant, an early Jumbo in fact, was the gem. His friends, who were numerous and powerful, tried to get a chair of comparative anatomy founded for him in the University. Various members of the medical faculty opposed it tooth and nail, as poaching on their preserves. One of Kay’s most famous caricatures represents Barclay seated on an elephant charging the college gate, which is barred against him by a learned crowd. The opposition succeeded and Barclay was never elected professor. Barclay had been brought up for the church, and in his early days had, during the absence of the Rev. Mr. Baird of Bo’ness, wagged his head in the pulpit of that divine. “How did they like him?” asked Baird of Sandy, the village sage or the village idiot or, perhaps, both. “Gey weel, minister, gey weel, but everybody thought him daft.” “Why, Sandy?” “Oh, for gude reasons, minister; Mr. Barclay was aye skinning puddocks” (frogs). It was reported that dogs fled in terror at the sight of him; the sagacious animals feared capture and dissection; he had incautiously cut up a dog in the presence of its kind and thus had an ill name in the canine world! Not that this implied any ill-will to dogs; quite the contrary, as witness a story of John Goodsir (1814-1867), who succeeded Monro _tertius_ as professor of anatomy in 1846. He had carefully studied the anatomy of the horse. “I love the horse, I love the horse,” he said with genuine fervour, “I have dissected him twice!” Barclay possessed an uncle, a full-blown divine, and the founder of a sect by some called after him. Nephew and uncle argued theological points. The young man was so hard to convince that the elder sent a heavy folio flying at his head; he dodged the missile, but if not confuted, was at any rate silenced.