1864 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – James Moncreiff
• Solicitor General for Scotland – George Young

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Colonsay
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Glenalmond

  Events

• 21 June – last public execution in Edinburgh – George Bryce, the Ratho murderer.
• 19 July – Chalmers Hospital opened in Banff, Aberdeenshire.
• 2 September – the first Ottoman ironclad Osmaniye is launched by Robert Napier and Sons on the River Clyde.
• 8 December – James Clerk Maxwell presents his paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field to the Royal Society, treating light as an electromagnetic wave.
• Hall, Russell & Company established as marine engineers in Aberdeen.
• The National Bank of Scotland becomes the first Scottish bank to open an office in London.
• Historian John Hill Burton publishes The Scot Abroad.

  Births

• 2 January – James Caird, shipowner
• 17 January – David Torrence, film actor
• 5 February – Marion Gilchrist, medical doctor
• 6 February – John Henry Mackay, anarchist writer
• 14 February – James Burns, shipowner
• 8 March – James Craig Annan, photographer
• 28 May – Jessie Newbery, née Rowat, embroiderer
• 10 June – Ninian Comper, Gothic Revival architect
• 7 October – Harrington Mann, painter
• 31 October – Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury
• 4 November – Robert Lorimer, architect
• 13 December – John Quinton Pringle, painter

  Deaths

• 6 January – John Clements Wickham, explorer, naval officer, magistrate and administrator
• 1 June – Sir John Watson Gordon, portrait painter
• 6 August – Catherine Sinclair, novelist and children's writer