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William Arthur graduated in medicine in Leiden in 1707 and practised in Fife, becoming a member of the Edinburgh College of Physicians in 1714. He received the Royal Warrant of appointment to the offices of the King’s Botanist and Keeper of the physic garden at Holyrood in 1715. However despite the Warrant saying he was ‘skilled in botany’ there is no evidence of this and it is likely that he secured the posts through political influence, accessed through his marriage. He was more famous for his involvement in a chaotic and unsuccessful Jacobite plot to seize Edinburgh Castle in 1715 (as told in Walter Scott’s ‘Tales of a Grandfather’) after which he escaped to Rome where he died the following year of dysentery.
Sources: Fletcher and Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists); (Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’)
D.W.

Born China 1924; died 1995
Although born in China, David Irvine returned to the Shetland Islands as a baby and was educated in Lerwick. He served in the RAF during the Second World War and in 1947 entered St Andrews University to read botany, staying on to take a PhD on the ecology of a single rock pool. During this period he became a founder member of the British Phycological (the scientific study of algae) Society. In 1954 he was appointed a Demonstrator in Agricultural Botany at the University of Cambridge where he stayed until 1958. He then spent 2 years as a research assistant at the University of Illinois contributing to the ‘Index Nominum Algarum’, an index of the published names of algae. In 1961 he returned to Britain as senior lecturer in the Department of Biology and Geology at the Polytechnic of North London where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. Although dedicating most of his academic life to the study of seaweeds in the north eastern Atlantic, David Irvine was an accomplished field biologist and natural historian with a wide range of interests. He led a number of field trips to study seaweeds and marine algae around Lundy Island, Sullom Voe and the Faroes. An avid collector, he bequeathed his herbarium and reprint collection to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Source: obituary, The Phycologist 1996 http://www.brphycsoc.org/documents/phycologist/The%20Phycologist%20No.%2044%20August%201996.pdf

https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/obituary-jimmy-ratter-tropical-botanist-devoted-study-brazils-cerrado-region-3061200