THE LATE SIR JOHN GRAHAM DALYELL, BARONET, OF BINNS, N.B.
This learned and accomplished gentleman was born in 1776. He was educated for the Scottish bar, to which he was called in the year 1797. Within a year or two after he was enrolled as a member of the Faculty, he produced his first quarto, Fragments of Scottish History. This was followed, in the year 1801, by a collection of Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century, in two octavo volumes. In 1809 appeared a Tract chiefly relative to Monastic Antiquities, with some Account of a recent Search for the Remains of the Scottish Kings interred in the Abbey of Dunfermline, the first of four or five thin octavos, in which Mr. Graham Dalyell called attention to those ecclesiastical records of the north, so many of which have since been printed by the Bannatyne, Maitland, and Spalding Clubs, under the editorial care of Mr. Cosmo Innes. A later and more laborious work was his Essay on the Darker Superstitions of Scotland; a performance which embodies the fruit of much patient study in rare and little read works, and affords many curious glimpses of the popular mythology of the north. The long list of the productions of Sir John Graham Dalyell closes with his Musical Memoirs of Scotland, published little more than a twelvemonth ago. The deceased baronet was distinguished also by his acquaintance with mechanical science, and still more by his knowledge of Natural History. Of the zeal with which he prosecuted this last pursuit, he has left a signal monument in his Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland. Sir John succeeded to the family title and estates, as sixth baronet, on the death of his elder brother, Sir James Dalyell, on February 1, 1841. He had previously been advanced to the honours of knighthood, by patent under the Great Seal, in the year 1836. He had been for some time in infirm health, and died at his residence, Great King Street, Edinburgh, on May 17, 1851, in his seventy-fourth year. Dying unmarried, he is succeeded by his younger brother, now Sir William Cunningham Cavendish Dalyell, of Binns, baronet, Commander R.N., Royal Hospital, Greenwich.
ABERDENIENSIS.