Wallace Martin Lindsay (1858-1937) was Professor of Humanity at St Andrews University, 1899 to 1937. He was a scholar of international repute, primarily in the classics and palaeography.
He was born in Pittenweem, Fife where his father was minister of the Free Church and was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Glasgow University, Balliol and the University of Leipzig. He came to the chair at St Andrews in 1899 after a year teaching in Harvard and nineteen years as a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He received honorary degrees from Glasgow, Heidelberg, Dublin and Groning and was made FBA.
He was observant, methodical, patient, accurate and vastly industrious, working in Latin studies and as an authority in Palaeography. His monumental Latin Language (1894) was written before his arrival in St Andrews. His other publications include: Short Historical Latin Grammar (1895), Introduction to Latin Textual Emendation (1897), Contractions in Early Latin Minuscule Manuscripts (1908), Early Irish Minuscule Script (1910), Early Welsh Script (1912). He wrote the volumes of the Oxford Classical Texts series on Martial, Plautus, Isidore and Terence and those on Nonius Marcellus and Festus in the Teubner series. He wrote on Early Latin Verse and latterly focussed on Medieval Latin Glossaries. He corresponded with a wide circle of scholars world-wide on points of learning. His brother was Principal of the Free Church College in Glasgow. He lived in St Andrews with his sister. He was killed in a road traffic accident in St Andrews in 1937.
Source: 'Obituary' in Alumnus Chronicle, no. 21, pp. 17-19, and Who was Who, 1929-40 (London, 1941), p. 812.
