Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/130

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Scougal
122
Scouler

crosses about and beside them.’ But if he accepted presbyterianism, he never ceased to be a royalist; and when Charles II came to Scotland as king in 1650, Scougal contributed 100l. towards levying a regiment of horse for his majesty's service. This may have helped, after the defeat at Dunbar, to hinder his settlement at Cupar, to which he was unanimously called; but in 1658 he was translated to Salton in Haddingtonshire. There, in his native county, he was surrounded by eminent men, who were much of his own way of thinking—Robert Leighton [q. v.] (afterwards archbishop) was at Newbattle; Lawrence Charteris [q. v.] at Yester; while Robert Douglas [q. v.] was minister of Pencaitland in the same presbytery. In 1661 Scougal was one of the commissioners appointed by the Scots parliament for ‘trying the witches in Samuelston.’ In October 1662 he signified his compliance with the restored episcopacy by accepting a presentation from Charles II to the parish which he held; in 1664 he was promoted to the bishopric of Aberdeen, and on 11 April was consecrated at St. Andrews by Archbishop Sharp and others. ‘In him,’ says Bishop Burnet (Preface to the Life of Bishop Bedell, 1685), ‘the see of Aberdeen was as happy in this age as it was in his worthy predecessor, Forbes’ [see Forbes, Patrick, (1564–1635)]. ‘With a rare humility, tolerance, and contempt of the world, there was combined in him a wonderful strength of judgment, a dexterity in the conduct of affairs which he employed chiefly in the making up of differences,’ ‘and a discretion in his whole deportment.’ The dissenters themselves seemed to esteem him no less than the conformists; he could, however, be severe enough on the quakers, who more than the covenanters opposed him in his diocese, and his treatment of Gordon, the parson of Banchory, was harsh. In both instances, and indeed throughout his episcopate, he was blamed for being too much under the influence of the primate, Sharp. One signal service, however, the church of Scotland owed him: his courageous opposition to the Test Act (1681). He thought of resigning his see on account of it; and to him chiefly it was due that the privy council allowed it to be taken in a mitigated form. He died on 16 Feb. 1682, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, and was buried in the south aisle of the nave of his cathedral, where his monument, bearing his effigy, is still preserved. Bishop Scougal married, on 6 Jan. 1660, Ann Congaltoun, who died in 1696; and had three sons—John, commissary of Aberdeen; James (afterwards elevated to the Scottish bench by the title of Lord Whitehill); and Henry [q. v.]—and two daughters: Catherina, who married Bishop Scrogie of Argyle; and Jane, the wife of Patrick Sibbald, one of the ministers of Aberdeen.

Portraits of the bishop are in the university of Aberdeen.

[Epitaph; Burnet; Keith's Cat. of Scottish Bishops; Grub's Eccles. Hist. of Scotland; Hew Scott's Fasti Eccl. iii. 886.]

J. C.

SCOULER, JOHN (1804–1871), naturalist, the son of a calico-printer, was born in Glasgow on 31 Dec. 1804. He received the rudiments of his education at Kilbarchan, but was sent very early to the university of Glasgow. When his medical course there was completed, he went to Paris and studied at the Jardin des Plantes. On his return Dr. (afterwards Sir William Jackson) Hooker [q. v.] secured for him an appointment as surgeon and naturalist on board the Hudson's Bay Company's ship William and Mary. The vessel sailed from London on 25 July 1824 for the Columbia river, touching at Madeira, Rio, and the Galapagos. His companion on the voyage out and in many excursions at the several ports was the botanist, David Douglas [q. v.] His stay at the Columbia river appears to have lasted from April to September 1825 (Edinb. Journ. Sci. vols. v. vi.) Soon after his return to England Scouler shipped as surgeon on the Clyde, a merchant vessel that went to Calcutta, touching by the way at the Cape and Madras. On his return to Glasgow he settled down to practice (graduating M.D. in 1827), till he was appointed, 18 June 1829, ‘professor of geology and natural history and mineralogy’ in the Andersonian University (now part of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College). In 1834 he was appointed professor of mineralogy, and subsequently of geology, zoology, and botany, to the royal Dublin Society, a post he held till his retirement on a pension in 1854, when he returned to Glasgow.

The state of his health in 1853 and 1854 induced him to visit Portugal; he also made a tour in Holland, and in later years visited Scandinavia. After his retirement he occasionally lectured, and he superintended the Andersonian Museum. He had been elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1829, and made LL.D. of Glasgow in 1850. He died at Glasgow on 13 Nov. 1871. He was buried at Kilbarchan.

Scouler was author of upwards of twenty papers on various natural history subjects and meteorology published between 1826 and 1852. He established, with two medical