post for him in the office of public works and buildings, and in 1869 he was appointed secretary to the then first commissioner, Mr. A. H. Layard, on a treasury report that ‘the first commissioner required the aid of an officer conversant in a high degree with architecture, in reference to questions connected with existing or contemplated buildings.’ His title was shortly afterwards changed to that of ‘inspector of public buildings and monuments,’ but strange to say his advice on the erection of the most important public building of the time, the new courts of justice, was not asked, and it is said that he was not even allowed to see the designs. Probably professional jealousy set him down as an amateur and a theorist. In any case he took the opportunity of a change of ministry soon afterwards to retire from his office. In 1856 Fergusson was elected by the committee a member of the Athenæum Club, and in 1871 the Institute of British Architects awarded him the royal gold medal for architecture. Wyatt, president of the institute, warmly acknowledged his merits in presenting the medal.
Fergusson's power of laborious research, and of systematising the results of his own accurate observation and the labours of others, enabled him to invest the historical study of architecture, particularly Indian architecture, with a new interest. But he threw light on many other subjects. In 1835, while residing as a planter in Bengal, he had observed the changes, and made a sketch survey, afterwards published, of the Lower Ganges and Brahmaputra, and in 1863 he contributed to the ‘Quarterly Journal’ of the Geological Society, of which he was for many years an active member of council, a remarkably interesting paper on the ‘Recent Changes in the Delta of the Ganges, and the Natural Laws regulating the Courses of Rivers.’ He was also an active and most efficient member of the several committees engaged in the decoration of St. Paul's Cathedral. So late as 1883 he once more turned his attention to his favourite theory regarding the lighting of the Greek temples, and having prepared a large model of the Parthenon, he published ‘The Parthenon: an Essay on the Mode by which Light was introduced in Greek and Roman Temples.’ The subject failed apparently to attract the attention either of critics or practical men. Fergusson fortunately had the opportunity of giving it practical shape in the gallery at Kew in which Miss North's pictures of flowers are exhibited. It is generally admitted to be one of the most successful picture galleries as regards light in the kingdom. In his articles on ‘Stonehenge’ in the ‘Quarterly Review’ for July 1860 and on ‘Non-historic Times’ in the same review for April 1870 he argued that these megalithic remains are of more recent date than is generally supposed; and he afterwards developed his reasons in his ‘Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries, their Age and Uses.’ Although never a professional architect he was frequently consulted on architectural questions, and to the close of his life his pen was constantly employed on articles for periodicals and letters to the newspapers. His last contribution of this kind was an article in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ for November 1885 on ‘The Restoration of Westminster Hall.’ In the following month he was seized with a second attack of paralysis, to which he succumbed on 9 Jan. 1886. To those who knew him in other than an official or controversial capacity he revealed an affectionate and even tender nature. Schliemann dedicated his great work, ‘Tiryns,’ to Fergusson, as ‘the historian of architecture, eminent alike for his knowledge of art and for the original genius which he has applied to the solution of some of its most difficult problems.’
[Times, 11 Jan. 1886; Athenæum, No. 3038, 16 Jan. 1886; Annual Register, 1886; Journal of the Royal Asiatic Soc. 1886, new ser. vol. xviii.]
FERGUSSON, ROBERT (1750–1774), Scotch poet, was born at Edinburgh 5 Sept. 1750 in a lane somewhere in the course of the modern North Bridge Street. His father, William Fergusson, was at the time clerk to the only haberdasher in the city, having a few years previously left his native Tarland, Aberdeenshire, in search of improved fortune. His mother was the youngest daughter of John Forbes, a man of agricultural position in Aberdeenshire, and a cadet of the house of Tolquhon. Their family probably numbered five in all, and Robert was the third son. Both parents were upright and persevering, and the father pushed forward till he held, at his death in 1767, the position of managing clerk in the linen department of the British Linen Company, Edinburgh. Fergusson's mother had taught him carefully, and although a very delicate boy, he passed through a preparatory school with distinction, and entered the high school at an unusually early age. When he had been four years here, on the advice of his uncle, John Forbes, farmer and factor in Aberdeenshire, and through the influence of Lord Finlater, chancellor of Scotland, he secured a Fergusson bursary, which implied preparatory study at the grammar school, Dundee, and a four years' curriculum at St. Andrews University. He matriculated at St. Andrews in
