1860 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – James Moncreiff
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Edward Maitland

  Judiciary

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

  Events

• 15 September – King's and Marischal Colleges in Aberdeen merge as the University of Aberdeen.
• October – the Royal National Lifeboat Institution stations the first Thurso life-boat at Scrabster.
• 17 October – the first professional golf tournament is held at Prestwick, regarded as the first Open.
• 21 December – St Mary's Cathedral, Aberdeen is dedicated.
• Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, opens.
• Andrew Stewart sets up the Clyde Tube Works in Glasgow, a predecessor of Stewarts & Lloyds.
• Folklorist John Francis Campbell begins publication of Popular Tales of the West Highlands in Edinburgh.

  Births

• 6 March – Ronald Munro Ferguson, 1st Viscount Novar, politician, 6th Governor-General of Australia
• 7 March – John Duncan Watson, civil engineer
• 22 March – John George Bartholomew, cartographer
• 15 April – Edward Arthur Walton, painter
• 2 May
• * John Scott Haldane, physiologist
• * D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, biologist
• 9 May – J. M. Barrie, author
• 30 May – Archibald Thorburn, wildlife painter
• 3 July – William Wallace, composer
• 31 July – George Warrender, admiral
• 3 August – William Kennedy Dickson, inventor, pioneer of cinematography, born in France
• 19 August – John Kane, naïve painter
• 25 September – John Hope, 7th Earl of Hopetoun, 1st Governor-General of Australia
• 21 November – James Leith Macbeth Bain, religious minister, hymn writer and walker
• 26 November – James Whitelaw Hamilton, landscape painter
• James Miller, architect

  Deaths

• 27 January – Major-General Sir Thomas Brisbane, former Governor of New South Wales and astronomer
• 25 March – James Braid, surgeon and scientist, often regarded as the first genuine hypnotherapist
• 1 April – William Mure, scholar and politician
• 25 August – William Wilson, poet and publisher
• James Barr, composer