records, and that this bright period of brilliant research should have become obscured by the scholasticism inherent in the method of classification which he himself did so much to popularise.
In accordance with tradition, the Chair vacated by Hope was filled by the election of another medical practitioner in Edinburgh. Daniel Rutherford was born in Edinburgh 3rd November, 1749, the son of Dr John Rutherford, who as Professor was associated with Alston and others in the reformation of the Edinburgh Medical School. He was distinguished both as a classical scholar and as a mathematician, and after graduating M.A. at the University of Edinburgh, he entered on the medical curriculum, obtaining his diploma of M.D. in 1772. His thesis, when applying for the degree, was "De aero fixo dicto aut Mephitico," and by this he became famous through the distinction he established in it between carbonic acid gas and nitrogen, though he did not give nitrogen its name. The exposition he gave of his precise experimental work has been allowed to entitle him to be regarded as the discoverer of nitrogen, although shortly before the appearance of his thesis Priestley had practically, if less methodically, covered the ground. After graduation, Rutherford travelled in France and Italy, returning to Edinburgh in 1775 to begin the practice of Medicine, becoming Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, of which he was afterwards President.
Rutherford was a chemist, and I have not discovered in any references to him expressions that would show he was at this period of his life interested in plants otherwise than as objects for his experiments in relation to the chemistry of the atmosphere. In seeking for a reason to explain his selection as Hope's successor in the Chair of Medicine and Botany, one may suggest either the general one of recognition of his scientific ability, or the more special one that in experimenting with plants he had been following on the lines of work so conspicuously developed by Hope. And of course at that time some general knowledge of Botany had to be the possession of every successful physician.
Like his predecessors, Rutherford had to undertake clinical
