1865 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

• 16 January – new fishing harbour at St Monans completed.
• 3 March – Thomas Sutherland founds the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
• 28 July – English general practitioner Edward William Pritchard becomes the last person publicly hanged in Glasgow, for poisoning his wife and mother-in-law in the city.
• 6 October – the iron cargo/passenger steamer Agamemnon is launched by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock. Equipped with an efficient compound steam engine, she pioneers trade by steam to the Far East.
• 30–31 December – 24 vessels are wrecked around the Dubh Artach reef in a storm.
• 165 emigrants leave the island of Raasay for Australia.
• Joseph Lister begins to experiment with antiseptic surgery in Glasgow using carbolic acid.
• Fourth cholera pandemic reaches Scotland.
• James Clerk Maxwell publishes A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.
• Amhuinnsuidhe Castle on Harris is built for Charles Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore by David Bryce.

  Births

• 20 March – Alan MacMasters, scientist, inventor of the electric toaster
• 28 March – Mary Findlater, novelist
• 27 April – Archibald Leitch, architect, most famous for his work designing stadia throughout the British Isles
• 28 June – David Young Cameron, painter
• 17 October – Dugald Cowan, educationalist and Liberal politician
• 6 November – William Boog Leishman, military physician
• William Gillies, nationalist

  Deaths

• 18 January – James Beaumont Neilson, ironmaster
• 5 June – John Richardson, Royal Navy surgeon, naturalist and arctic explorer
• 4 August – William Edmondstoune Aytoun, poet, humorist and lawyer
• 19 October – Robert Crichton Wyllie, physician, businessman and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of Hawaii
• 23 December – Alan Stevenson, lighthouse designer

  The arts

• Thomas Faed's painting :File:Thomas Faed - The Last of the Clan.JPG|The Last of the Clan is first exhibited
• Gaelic poet William Livingston 's collection Duain agus Orain is published in Glasgow
• George MacDonald's novel Alec Forbes of Howglen is published