Baikie, WILLIAM BALFOUR, traveller, naturalist, and philologist, was born at Kirkwall, Orkney, 27th August 1825, and having studied medicine in Edinburgh, entered the royal navy as assistant-surgeon in 1848. He served in the Mediterranean, and from 1851 to 1854 acted as assistant-surgeon at Haslar Hospital. He was appointed surgeon and naturalist to the Niger expedition of 1854, and succeeding through the captain's death to the command of the Pleiad, in his first voyage he penetrated 250 miles higher than any previous traveller; but in his second expedition of 1857 the Pleiad was wrecked, and he was left by his fellow-explorers to continue his work alone. He founded a native settlement called Lukoja, at the junction of the Quorra and Benue, and within five years he had opened the navigation of the Niger, constructed roads, collected a native vocabulary, and translated parts of the Bible and Prayer-book into Hausa. He died while on leave of absence at Sierra Leone, 12th December
1864. The cathedral of St Magnus, Kirkwall, contains a monument to his memory. He published List of Books and Manuscripts relating to Orkney (Zetland, 1847); along with R. Heddle, Historia Naturalis Orcadensis; Zoology (Part I, 1848); and Observations on the Hausa and Fulfulde Languages (1861).