Alexander Dickson (botanist)
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Alexander Dickson FRSE |
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| Born | Edinburgh |
| Died | 30 December 1887 (aged 51) Hartree, Peeblesshire |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Botanist |
Prof Alexander Dickson FRSE LLD (21 February 1836 – 30 December 1887) was a Scottish morphological botanist and botanical artist.
His family had previously had members in the legal and medical professions; one of the earliest of whom any special records exist having been John Dickson of Kilbucho and Hartree, a lawyer, who in 1649 was appointed a Senator of the College of Justice, taking the title of Lord Hartree.
He was born at 6 Fettes Row in Edinburgh on 21 February 1836 the son of David Dickson of Hartree, an advocate.
Dickson received his early education at home. In 1855, he entered the University of Edinburgh as a student of medicine; and soon engaged with enthusiasm in those preliminary scientific studies which have so frequently been the occasion of the first awakenings of latent scientific impulses. In him they appear to have served this purpose. He became an enthusiastic biologist; and a warm admirer and disciple of Goodsir, in whose philosophical tendencies he found, like many of his friends, the inspiring direction that soon became so marked and characteristic a feature of his scientific work and aims. Engrossed in natural science, he took, it would seem, comparatively little interest in the purely professional or technical departments of the medical curriculum. He, however, appreciated differentiation as a means of promoting advancement in the art as well as in the science of medicine. In his inaugural address, delivered in 1859, as a President of the Royal Medical Society, he supposes the questions,
Dickson graduated as doctor of medicine in August 1860, having previously, in accordance with his biological proclivities, studied under Albert von Kölliker in Würzburg and Rudolf Virchow in Berlin. His career as a teacher of botany began in the summer of 1862, when he conducted the class of botany in the University of Aberdeen for Professor George Dickie, who was at the time incapacitated by bad health. He thus found an opportunity for displaying his merits as a teacher; and his success proved of much value in securing for him in 1866 the chair of Botany in the University of Dublin. Two years afterwards he was appointed Professor of Botany in the University of Glasgow, where he confirmed his early reputation as a clear and painstaking teacher and an enthusiastic worker in structural and morphological botany.
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