Robert Dick (geologist)

[1] At the age of thirteen, after receiving a good elementary education at the parish school, Dick was apprenticed to a baker, and served for three years.

In these early days he became interested in wildflowers—he made a collection of plants and gradually acquired some knowledge of their names from an old encyclopedia.

Then he obtained a copy of Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone (published in 1841), and he began systematically collecting with hammer and chisel the fossils from the Caithness flags.

His herbarium, which consisted of about 200 folios of mosses, ferns and flowering plants "almost unique in its completeness," is now stored, with many of his fossils, in the museum at Thurso.

A monument erected in the new cemetery at Thurso testifies to the respect which his life-work created, when the merits of this enthusiastic naturalist came to be appreciated.