to the selfish and original passions of human nature, unschooled by experience, unassisted by scale or measure, “the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connection.”[9] With the failure of Hume’s candidature for the Logic chair was lost a golden opportunity of associating two of the first philosophers of that age on the staff of a small provincial college in one of the poorest, rudest, and least frequented kingdoms of Western Europe. The legend that Burke (four years before he published his _Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful_) was another candidate has been adjudged apocryphal, though it was formerly accepted by good authorities. Many of the Glasgow students were Irish Presbyterians, and an Irishman might well have been encouraged to seek a chair in the University of Hutcheson. George Jardine, a student in 1760 and Professor of Logic from 1774, dated the first radical reform in the teaching of philosophy at Glasgow, from a royal visitation of 1727, after which each professor was restricted to a particular department instead of being required to lecture for three successive years in logic, ethics, and physics. He adds that the improvements thus introduced were greatly promoted by fortunate appointments. First came Dr. Francis Hutcheson, whose “copious and splendid eloquence” illustrated an amiable system of morality, and at the same time popularised the use of English as the medium of instruction. Hutcheson’s reforms were not suspended by his death. But the Logic class continued to be conducted in Latin until Adam Smith, being rather unexpectedly called to the office in 1750, “found it necessary to read in the English language a course of lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres which he had formerly delivered in Edinburgh.” The last department in the University to abandon Latin was Law, and the innovator was Smith’s pupil and friend, John Millar.