1868 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Edward Strathearn Gordon until December; then James Moncreiff
• Solicitor General for Scotland – John Millar; then George Young

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Glencorse
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Moncreiff

  Events

• 22 March – last fully public hanging in Scotland - that of Joseph Bell at Perth. There is another on 12 May at Dumfries.
• 13 July – Representation of the People Act 1868 passed, creating seven additional Scottish seats in the House of Commons at the expense of English ones, and giving the vote to all male householders.
• 19 August – the clipper Thermopylae is launched at Walter Hood & Company's Aberdeen shipyard for George Thompson's Aberdeen Line.
• October – Kilmarnock Infirmary opened.
• Queen Margaret College established by the Association for the Higher Education of Women.
• The Western General Hospital is established in Edinburgh.
• Crieff Hydro opened.
• George Baxter opens a grocery shop in Fochabers, the origin of Baxters foods.
• William Low grocery shop established by William Rettie and James Low.
• Rose's lime juice first manufactured, in Leith.

  Births

• 13 April – John Blackwood McEwen, composer
• 16 April – Spottiswoode Aitken, silent film actor and Hollywood property developer
• 5 June – James Connolly, Irish nationalist leader
• 7 June – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, architect, designer, watercolourist and artist
• 23 December – Herbert MacNair, artist and designer

  Deaths

• 10 February – David Brewster, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, writer and university principal
• 29 March – Susanna Hawkins, poet
• 17 June – George Arnott Walker-Arnott, botanist
• 17 August – Duncan Forbes, linguist
• 28 November – Robert Ferguson, Liberal politician