Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Obituary notice of Professor Alexander Dickson / by Thomas R. Fraser. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![disposition, gained for him, not only respect, but also warm and grateful afiection. Professor Dickson’s first botanical paper was 'iniblished in 1857, while he was yet a student of medicine. During the following twenty-nine years, his activity as a worker was shown by the publication of upwards of fifty papers. ]\Iaiay of them rank as masterpieces of accurate and elaborate description, and of philosophical conceptions of structure. A glance over the appended list shows his great partiality for subjects bearing on development and morphology, in which departments of botany he acquired the position of an eminent authority. In confirmation of these statements, it is sufficient to cite his graduation thesis (for which he obtained a gold medal) “ On the Development of tlie Flower, and especially the Pistil, in the Caryophyllaceccf and his papers on the Morphology of the Eeproductive Organs of the Coniferce, on the Embryo and its Appendages in Tropceolmn, on the Embryology and Development of the Flower of Pingtdcula, on the Spiral Arrangements of the Cones of Pinus pinaster, and on the Morphology and Structure of the Ifitchers in Cephalotus and Nepenthes. On account of his eminence as a botanist and teacher, he was made honorary M.D. of the University of Dublin, LL.D. of the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the Liunaean Society, and President of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh. Professor Dickson took much interest in matters outside of his immediate professorial duties and scientific pursuits. He was a Conservative in State and Church politics. On various occasions he actively supported candidates for parlia- mentary representation. A consistent Free Churchman, he remained true to the original position of that Church, and opposed publicly the policy which an influential majority had adopted, of reversing its traditions on the question of a State-recognised and State-supported Church. He strenuously opposed the legislative attempts, which fortunately proved abortive, to modify the special characters of medical educa- tion and graduation in the Scottish universities for the mere sake of bringing them into harmony with the systems prevail- ing in the southern division of the United Kingdom. He looked with much distrust on the schemes, embodied in the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21945378_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
