BALFOUR, ROBERT (BALFOREUS) (1550?-1625?), Scot tish philosopher, was educated at St. Andrews and at Paris. He was for many years principal of Guienne college, Bordeaux. His great work is his Commentarii in Organum Logicum Aristotelis (Bordeaux, 1618) ; the copy in the British Museum contains a number of highly-eulogistic poems in his honour. Balfour was one of the scholars who contributed to spread over Europe the fame of the prae f ervidum ingenium Scotorum. His contempo rary, Dempster, called him the "phoenix of his age, a philoso pher profoundly skilled in the Greek and Latin languages, and a mathematician worthy of being compared with the ancients." His Cleomedis meteora, with notes and Latin translation, was reprinted at Leiden as late as 1820.
See T. Dempster, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum (Bonn, 1627) ; D. Irving, Lives of Scottish Writers (Edinburgh, 1839) ; W. Anderson, The Scottish Nation, i. 217 (Edinburgh, 1863) .