anxious to secure his services, and he was invited to
succeed Professor George Rolleston at Oxford and Sir Wyville Thomson at
Edinburgh. But although he was only a college lecturer, holding no official
post in his university, he declined to leave Cambridge, and in the spring
of 1882 the university recognized his merits by instituting a special
professorship of animal morphology for his benefit. Unhappily he did not
deliver a single professorial lecture. During the first term after his
appointment he was incapacitated from work by an attack of typhoid fever.
Going to the Alps to recruit his health, he perished, probably on the 19th
of July 1882, in attempting the ascent of the Aiguille Blanche, Mont Blanc,
at that time unscaled. Besides being a brilliant morphologist, Balfour was
an accomplished naturalist, and had he lived would probably have taken a
high place among British taxonomists.

BALFOUR, SIR JAMES, BART. (of Denmylne and Kinnaird) (_c._ 1600-1657),
Scottish annalist and antiquary. He was well acquainted with Sir William
Segar and with Dugdale, to whose _Monasticon_ he contributed. He was
knighted by Charles I. in 1630, was made Lyon king-at-arms in the same
year, and in 1633 baronet of Kinnaird. He was removed from his office of
king-at-arms by Cromwell and died in 1657. Some of his numerous works are
preserved in the Advocates' library at Edinburgh, together with his
correspondence--from which rich collection Haig published _Balfour's
Annales of Scotland_ in 4 vols. 8vo (1824-1825).

See Sibbald, _Memoria Balfouriana_ (1699).

BALFOUR, SIR JAMES (of Pittendreich) (d. 1583 or 1584), Scottish judge and
politician, son of Sir Michael Balfour of Montquhanny, was educated for the
legal branch of the church of Scotland. In June 1547, together with Knox
and others taken at St Andrews, he was condemned to the French galleys, but
was released in 1549, abjured the reformers, entered the service of Mary of
Guise, and was rewarded with some considerable legal appointments.
Subsequently he went over to the lords of the congregation and then
betrayed their plans. After Mary's arrival in Scotland he became one of her
secretaries, in 1565 being reported as her greatest favourite after
Rizzio.[1] He obtained the parsonage of Flisk in Fife in 1561, was
nominated a lord of session, and in 1563 one of the commissaries of the
court which now took the place of the former ecclesiastical tribunal; in
1565 he was made a privy-counci