University of Edinburgh Archive and Manuscript Collections

Scope and Contents Extracts chiefly from Sir Robert Sibbald's books and MSS on natural history in the Advocates' Library. Subjects include minerals, antiquities (e.g., Roman epigraphy, bones in medieval battlefields), sea and animal life, native customs (magical scarves that cattlemen's wives once wore), geographic curiosities (a cliff that shines in the sun, a natural hole of unsoundable depth, there being no frogs in Getland, etc.) Approximately 178 handwritten pages. Authorship not known with...

Scope and Contents

1761 descriptive list of 146 important titles in natural history; notes on 'Boece's Chronology' [of kings of the Scots back to BC 330]. 'Boece' is probably Dundee-born historian Hector Boethius (c.1465 - 1536). Approximately 80 handwritten pages.

An eighteenth-century hand denotes this 'M.S. Vol. 37'. The leaf holding pages 3 and 4 has been excised.

Scope and Contents Scots plants of the Linnaean class Cryptogamea; History of the mines at Wanloch Head; Elevatio Plantarum; Epistola ad Linnaeum; Letter to Sr James Nasmyth; Hortulan experiments; The old Gardens at Bargaly; Note on the Battle of the Bree; Some fruits at Munches in Galloway; Scots insects; the Loch Fyne shark; Two fossils; 8 species of Tremella; 2 species of Clavaria; Description of Agaricus Annulata; and of Lichen Punctatus; agricultural benefits of the Nile's overflow and Vesuvius' eruption;...