Law officers edit

• Lord Advocate – Duncan McNeill
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Adam Anderson

Judiciary edit

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Boyle
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Hope

• 31 July – Aberdeen Railway Bill receives Royal Assent^[1]
• 14 August – the Falkirk Herald newspaper is first published
• October – Aberdeen stock exchange formed
• Glasgow Academy founded
• Tolbooth Kirk, Edinburgh, designed by James Gillespie Graham and Augustus Pugin, is completed as a church and General Assembly hall (Victoria Hall) for the Church of Scotland in the Royal Mile
• Scottish Rights of Way Society established
• Publication of the New Statistical Account of Scotland is completed
• Publication of Robert William Billings' The Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland begins.

• 8 January – James Stedman Dixon, leading coal-mine owner (died 1911)
• 14 February – Cecil Valentine De Vere, born Cecil Valentine Brown, chess player (died 1875)
• 25 February – George Reid, Prime Minister of Australia, later Member of Parliament (UK) (died 1918)
• 17 March – Robert Fleming, financier (died 1933)
• 28 October – Robert Gibb, painter (died 1932)
• 2 December – Alexander Crombie, surgeon (died 1906)
• David Forsyth, chess player (died 1909 in New Zealand)
• James Manson, locomotive engineer (died 1935)

• 7 August – Robert Graham, physician and botanist (born 1786)
• 30 September – Robert Forsyth, writer (born 1766)
• 26 October – Carolina Nairne, songwriter (born 1766)

• Penicuik hosts the inaugural Grand Match in curling, between the north and the south of Scotland.

• Timeline of Scottish history
• 1845 in Ireland