body was brought home to England and buried at Whittinghame.
Probably few lives of this generation were so full of promise as the one thus cut short. The remarkable powers which Balfour possessed of rapid yet exact observation, of quick insight into the meaning of the things observed, of imaginative daring in hypothesis kept straight by a singularly clear logical sense, through which the proven was sharply distinguished from the merely probable, made all biologists hope that the striking work which he had already done was but the earnest of still greater things to come. Nor do biologists alone mourn him. In his college, in his university, and elsewhere, he was already recognised as a man of most unusual administrative abilities. Whatever he took in hand he did masterly and with wisdom. Yet to his friends his intellectual powers seemed a part only of his worth. High-minded, generous, courteous, a brilliant fascinating companion, a steadfast loving friend,he won, as few men ever did, the hearts of all who were privileged to know him.
[Personal knowledge.]
BALFOUR, Sir JAMES (d. 1583), of Pittendreich, Scottish judge, was a son of Sir Michael Balfour, of Mountquhanny, in Fife. Educated for the priesthood, he adopted the legal branch of the clerical profession, as was common in Scotland at this period. Having taken part with his brothers, David and Gilbert, in the plot for the assassination of Cardinal Beaton, he shared the fate of the conspirators, who, on the surrender of the castle of St. Andrews, in June 1547, to the French, were allowed to save their lives by service in the galleys. John Knox, his fellow prisoner in the same galley, who looked upon Balfour as a renegade, and denounces him as a manifest blasphemer and the principal misguider of Scotland for his desertion from the party of the reformers, records his release in 1549, which, according to Spottiswoode, a less adverse authority, was due to his abjuring his profession. Soon after he became official of the archdeaconry of Lothian, and chief judge of the consistorial court of the archbishop of St. Andrews. He continued for some years to support the policy of Mary of Guise, then, passing over to that of the lords of the congregation, was admitted to their councils, and betrayed their secrets. He was rewarded by the preferment of the parsonage of Flick, in Fife. Soon after Queen Mary's return to Scotland, he was nominated an extraordinary lord, 12 Nov. 1561, and on 15 Nov. 1563 an ordinary lord, of the court of session. The abolition, in 1560, of the ecclesiastical consistorial jurisdiction, one of the first fruits of the Reformation, led to great confusion with reference to the important causes that had been referred to it. Besides others, all those relating to marriage, legitimacy, and wills, were in its control, and it was found necessary to institute a oommisary court at Edinburgh in its stead. Balfour was the chief of the four first commisaries, and the charter of their appointment, on 8 Feb. 1563, is printed in the treatise which has received the name of 'Balfour's Practicks.' With other partisans of Bothwell and Bothwell himself he is said to have escaped from Holyrood on the night of Rizzio's murder, but Macgill, the lord clerk register, having been deprived of that office for his share in the plot, Balfour succeeded to the vacancy. Common rumour, supported in this instance by probable evidence, assigned to Balfour the infamous part of having drawn the bond for Damley's murder, and provided the lodging, a house of one of his brothers, in the Kirk o' Field, where the deed was done. Though not present, according to the confessions of the perpetrators on, he was accused of complicity by the tickets or placards which appeared on the walls of Edinburgh immediately after the commission of the crime. His appointment, during the short period of Bothwell's power, to the incongruous post — for a lawyer — of governor of Edinburgh Castle; his acting as commissary in the divorce suit by Lady Bothwell against her husband, and as lord clerk register in the registration of Mary's consent to the contract of marriage with Bothwell, leave no doubt that he was a useful and ready instrument in the hands of the chief assassin, and received his reward. With an adroitness in changing sides in which, though not singular, he excelled the other politicians of the time, he forestalled the fall of Bothwell and made terms with Murray by the surrender of the castle, receiving in return a gift of the priory of Pittenweem, an annuity for his son out of the rents of the priory of St. Andrews, and a pardon for his share in Darnley's death. According to the journal ascribed to Mary's secretary, Nau, it was by the advice of Balfour, 'a traitor who offered himself first to the one party and then to the other,' that the queen left Dunbar and took the march to Edinburgh which led to her surrender at Carberry Hill. He was present at the battle of Langside, in the regent's army. Having surrendered the office of lord clerk register to allow of the reinstatement of Macgill, a friend of the regent Murray, Balfour received
