Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/15

 payment for any article sent to a periodical.’ Always a keen controversialist, he often wrote more pungently than he intended (cf. Journal of Botany, 1881, p. 80). Keen and active as a politician, and an uncompromising democrat, he published in 1848, the year of revolution, a pamphlet entitled ‘Public Opinion, or Safe Revolution through Self-representation,’ in which he recommended a national association to take plebiscites on any public question.

Watson died unmarried at Thames Ditton on 27 July 1881. A lithographic portrait of him in 1839 by J. Graf, after Haghe, accompanies a memoir of him in Neville Wood's ‘Naturalist’ for that year, and a photograph of him in later life, the memoir by Mr. John Gilbert Baker, in the ‘Journal of Botany’ for 1881. His British herbarium, which he at one time firmly intended to destroy, is preserved separately at Kew, and his general collection at Owens College, Manchester.

Besides books already mentioned and forty-nine papers on critical species of plants, hybridism, and geographical distribution credited to him in the Royal Society's ‘Catalogue’ (vi. 280, viii. 1202), Watson's chief works are: 1. ‘Outlines of the Geographical Distribution of British Plants,’ Edinburgh, 1832, 8vo, of which he considered ‘Remarks on the Distribution of British Plants, chiefly in connection with Latitude, Elevation, and Climate,’ London, 1835, 12mo, as a second edition, and ‘The Geographical Distribution of British Plants,’ of which only part i. (London, 1843, 8vo), including Ranunculaceæ, Nymphæaceæ, and Papaveraceæ, was ever published, as a third. 2. ‘The new Botanist's Guide to the Localities of the Rarer Plants of Britain,’ London, 1835–7, 2 vols. 8vo; dedicated to Sir W. J. Hooker. 3. ‘Topographical Botany; being Local and Personal Records … of British Plants traced through the 112 Counties and Vice-Counties,’ Thames Ditton, 1873–4, 2 vols. 8vo, of which only a hundred copies were printed; second edition, corrected and enlarged, edited by J. G. Baker and W. W. Newbould, London, 1883.

[Neville Wood's Naturalist, 1839, iv. 264; and memoir by J. G. Baker, reprinted from the Journal of Botany in the second edition of Watson's Topographical Botany, 1883.]  WATSON, JAMES (d. 1722), Scottish printer, and the publisher of the famous ‘Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scottish Poems,’ was the son of a merchant in Aberdeen who had advanced money to two Dutch printers to set up a printing establishment in Edinburgh. Failing to make their business remunerative, they made over their printing house to the elder Watson, who, having craved repayment of a sum of money lent to Charles II when in exile, obtained instead the gift of being sole printer of almanacs in Scotland, and was also made printer to his majesty's family and household, with a salary of 100l. a year. He died in 1687.

The son set up as a printer in 1695 in Warriston Close, on the north side of the High Street, whence, in 1697, he removed to premises in Craig's Close, opposite the Cross, long afterwards known as the King's Printing-house. In 1700 he was imprisoned in the Tolbooth for printing a pamphlet on ‘Scotland's Grievance regarding Darien,’ but was released by the mob, who on 1 June forced an entrance into the prison by burning and battering down the doors. In 1700 he began to publish the ‘Edinburgh Gazette,’ and he was also the printer of the ‘Edinburgh Courant,’ which was first issued (19 Feb. 1705) as a tri-weekly paper. In 1709 he opened a bookseller's shop next door to the Red Lion and opposite the Luckenbooths, which faced St. Giles's Church.

On the expiry of the patent of king's printer conferred on Andrew Anderson, and then held by his widow, Watson entered into negotiations with Robert Fairbairn and John Baskett [q. v.] (queen's printer for England) to apply for the patent in Fairbairn's name, each to have one-third of the patent. The application was successful, the patent being obtained in August 1711. On Fairbairn becoming printer to the Pretender, in 1715, Mrs. Anderson, along with Baskett, applied for a new gift, on the ground that the late patent was void; but the court of session decided in Watson's favour, and on appeal to the lords its judgment was confirmed. In 1713 Watson issued a ‘History of Printing’—mainly translated from the French of J. de la Caille, Paris, 1689—with a ‘publisher's preface to the printers in Scotland,’ containing various particulars regarding Watson's own business. In beauty and accuracy of workmanship Watson quite surpassed his Edinburgh contemporaries, the most important example of his art being his folio bible, 1722. But the book by which he will be longest and most worthily remembered is his ‘Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scottish Poems,’ issued in three parts (1706, 1709, 1711), and containing many characteristic examples of the older ‘makers,’ as well as various contemporary broadsides. It properly inaugurates the revival of the Scots vernacular poetry, which, through Ramsay and Ferguson, was to culminate in Burns; and it was the main source, with Ramsay's ‘Evergreen,’ of Burns's