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 have written for Kieser's work1 on the subject, which Brown says is the best. Mirbel has seen what nobody else can; so nobody contradicts him, though many won't believe him.’