Excerpt from Aberdeen: Topographical, Antiquarian, and Historical Papers on the City of Aberdeen

This volume consists of a series of papers on Aberdeen which were written for a newspaper without any intention of reproducing them in book form. They have been reprinted in compliance with many requests from persons who wished to preserve them. This has been done not very willingly. The papers would have required to be rearranged and condensed in order to convert them into a book. They were written from week to week without any prearranged plan. Some of them described at great length things of little importance and now quite forgotten. This was done when the information given had not been previously published, or was not readily available.

An Index has been prepared, which shows that some papers contained repetitions of what had been written before. Where discrepant statements are made on any matter it may be understood that the second is intended to correct an error in the first, detected when it was printed and could not be changed. Some improvements have been made in the process of revising the papers, but perfection has not been obtained in orthography.

On making Aberdeen my residence some years ago I found that the burns which I had been familiar with fifty years before were lost to sight. In some of these I had gathered freshwater mollusca when in Professor Mac-gillivray's class in Marischal College, and it was an interesting pastime to visit their fountain heads and trace their underground courses through the city. I next became anxious to know which of the streams connected with the city had given rise to the name Aberdeen. For this purpose I examined many books and wrote down all the forms I could find. I settled, to my own satisfaction at least, that Aberdeen does not mean the town at the mouth of the Dee but the town at the mouth of the Denburn.

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