At last, in August 1746, after taking his degree as a Bachelor of Arts, he retraced his steps to Scotland, and gave up all thought of a clerical career. In the words of his biographer, “he chose to consult in this instance his own inclinations in preference to the wishes of his friends; and abandoning at once all the schemes which their prudence had formed for him, he resolved to return to his own country and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.” He was now in 1746 again in his mother’s house at Kirkcaldy, “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” So far as I am aware, none of Adam Smith’s biographers has definitely assigned to this period any of the writings which he either published or left to his executors. In the latter class, however, there is a group of fragments dealing with the history of Astronomy, of Ancient Physics, and of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics, and an elaborate essay on _The Imitative Arts_, which are collectively described by his executors in an advertisement as “parts of a plan he once had formed for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts.”[6] The essay on _The Imitative Arts_ belongs to a different design and to a slightly later period. But it seems clear that the _History of Astronomy_ was composed at this time.[7] There is no other period of his life in which he would have been so well able to collect the materials for an examination of the systems of the Greek, the Arabian, and the mediæval astronomers as in the six years of Oxford study, or so likely to shape them into a finished treatise as in the two quiet years spent at Kirkcaldy immediately after his return, when, we are told, he was “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” The _History of Astronomy_, which takes us from the schools of Thales and Pythagoras through the systems of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes to that of Sir Isaac Newton, is complete in itself, though from certain notes and memoranda which accompanied it Smith’s executors were led to believe that he contemplated some further extension.[8] It ends very appropriately with an enthusiastic description of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery as the greatest ever made by man. He had acquired “the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy,” and was the only natural philosopher whose system, instead of being a mere invention of the imagination to connect otherwise discordant phenomena, appeared to contain in itself “the real chains which nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.” In attributing the _History of Astronomy_ to Oxford and Kirkcaldy I except the concluding pages, which must have been added in the last years of his life; for in a letter to Hume (1773) he spoke of it as a history of Astronomical Systems to the time (not of Newton but)