Early in February, 1820, my father was appointed by the Crown to the Chair of Botany in Glasgow, and having dispatched his library, herbarium, and household effects to London, to be thence sent by smack to Leith, and on to Glasgow by canal, he severed his connexion with Halesworth and the brewery. In May he presented himself before the Senate of the University, who gave him a flattering reception, read his inaugural thesis (the Latinity of which, thanks to his classical father-in-law, was highly praised), and was duly installed, with the welcome addition of having the honour of LL.D. conferred upon him.

Meanwhile the preparation for his course of botanical teaching, which commenced in May, had been for three months a grave anxiety. He had never taught, lectured, or even heard a course of lectures, and some important branches of the science he was called upon to profess were new to him. Such especially was the anatomy of plants, of which he writes: ‘It is a subject to which I have never attended, and authors are so much at variance as to their opinions, and on facts too, that I really do not know whom to follow. Knight in every one of his papers contradicts what he himself asserted in former ones, and has got handsomely lashed for it in the second number of the ‘British Review’; as has Sir James Smith, for adopting his theories and for giving him the highest praise for his perspicuity. I havewritten for Kieser's work1 on the subject, which Brown says is the best. Mirbel has seen what nobody else can; sonobody contradicts him, though many won't believe him.’

During his occupation of the Professorship of Botany in Glasgow University my father, feeling keenly his severance from the scientific society of London, was always on the lookout for a congenial position there, even if of less emolument than that which he held. The Professorship of Botany in the newly created University College of London (then entitled London University) was pressed on him by Lord Brougham, but the possibility of an appointment to the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew had for some years eclipsed all other prospects. Nor were his aspirations in this direction unreasonable, for over and above his botanical qualifications he had inherited a taste for cultivating plants, encouraged by ten years' experience in his own garden, greenhouse, and stove at Halesworth; he had twenty years' of good work in and for the Royal Botanic Gardens of Glasgow, and had been for thirteen years author of the ‘Botanical Magazine,’ a serial devoted to the illustration and description of cultivated plants. Added to this was the fact that Mr. Aiton, who as ‘Gardener to Her Majesty’ had controlled the Gardens of Kew since 1793, was approaching the age for retirement. Meanwhile the Kew Botanic Gardens, which for upwards of half a century had ranked as the richest in the world, had since the deaths, almost contemporaneously, of King George III and Sir Joseph Banks, been officially cold-shouldered, and had retrograded scientifically.