Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

1

sive public botanical garden in Europe, which has been enriched with a vast variety of vegetable productions from every part of the globe.

BESIDES these unremitting and successful exertions in forming and enriching the botanical garden, Dr HOPE was most assiduous in cherishing and promoting a zeal for botanical studies among the young gentlemen who resorted to the University of Edinburgh for medical education. His predecessor, Dr ALSTON, had only been in use to read a very small number of lectures on this science; but Dr HOPE was quite indefatigable in perfecting his lectures, till they became as complete and comprehensive as any scientific course in the celebrated medical school of Edinburgh; and in delivering this extended course, he always evinced an arden: enthusiasm to advance and extend his favourite science, which had a powerful effect to inspire similar emotions in his hearers. Among the means he employed to excite a spirit for botanical studies, he was long in use to bestow an annual gold medal entirely at his own expence, as a spur to exertion, and as a testimony of superior merit, for the best botanical essay

written by the students on a prescribed subject; a description of which has been already given.

BESIDES Some useful manuals for facilitating the acquisition of botany by his students, Dr HOPE was long engaged in the composition of an extensive botanical work, on which he bestowed much study and reflection; the object of which was to increase the advantages which result from the highly ingenious artificial system of the great LINNAEUS, by conjoining with it a system of vegetables distributed according to their great natural orders. He had made very considerable progress in this valuable work; and it is much to be regretted by every lover of botany, that the public has been deprived of the fruits of his labours on this important subject, as it was left imperfect at his death. Two valuable dissertations by this learned professor of botany have been published in the London Philosophical Transactions; one on the Rheum Palmatum, and the other on the Ferula Assafoetida, in which he demonstrates the practicability of cultivating these two officinal plants in our own country. The true rhubarb has been since extensively and successfully cultivated; but

that of the assafoetida plant has not been equally attended to.

ABOUT the year 1760, Dr HOPE married JULIANA, the daughter of Dr STEVENSON, an eminent physician in Edinburgh, by whom he had four sons and a daughter. After long enjoying much domestic felicity, and high honour in his profession, both as a physician and professor, he died, while President of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, after a short illness, on the 10th November 1786, in the 62d year of his age. The following character of this eminent person, from the pen of his friend Dr ANDREW DUNCAN, senior, Professor of the Institutes of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, gives a just and fair estimate of his talents and virtues *.

"ALTHOUGH he possessed from nature a considerable heat of temper, yet this was so regulated by the dictates of prudence, that it led only to such exertions as were good and useful. Although he often mentioned to his most intimate friends the trouble it

Med. Comment, Dec. II, vol. iii. p. 394.

was necessary for him to bestow in combating the keenness of his passions; and although he frequently expressed his regret that he had not been able to overcome them, yet, after an intimate connexion for more than twenty years, I am unacquainted with even a single instance, in which they betrayed him into any irregularity of conduct. Passions thus regulated are rather objects of desire than of regret; for it is by these alone that the cool indifference of philosophy can be made to partake of the tender feelings of human nature.-in one word, Dr HOPES conduct through life exhibited, to every attentive and candid observer, a striking picture of an able philosopher, an amiable physician, a sincere friend, an affectionate parent, and a worthy man.'

[ocr errors]

THE author of these pages had the advantage of attending Dr HOPES botanical lectures, and his practice as physician to the Royal Infirmary; and still remembers, with much pleasure, his excellent lectures on the physiology of vegetables, and his clear exposition of the LINNAEAN system of botanical arrangement. His humane and enlightened attention to the diseases of the patients un

der his care in the Royal Infirmary, and his judicious prescriptions for curing or alleviating their disorders, were most exemplary and instructive. He was an ornament to the University and to his profession, and a model to his students most worthy of imitation.

MR SMELLIE lived in great intimacy with the late Sir ALEXANDER DICK of Prestonfield, Bart, a most respectable, worthy, and ingenious member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, of which he was President for seven successive years. Mr SMELLIE was long in use to visit that gentleman at his country-house, about a mile from Edinburgh, every Saturday evening, where he remained till the Monday morning. This intimacy continued unabated during the lie of Sir ALEXANDER, who died in 1785, at the advanced age of eighty-two, in the full enjoyment of his faculties.

IN giving a selection from the early correspondence which passed between Mr SMELLIE and several of his youthful literary friends, we labour under some difficulties, and find it impossible to reduce the letters into any sa

« AnteriorContinuar »