This was all that the world knew of Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence and political economy, save that at the end of his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ he promised “another discourse” dealing with the general principles of law and government, and with the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, “not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else in the subject of law.” On the first section of his lectures Adam Smith never even promised a book. He had no ambition to bring the kirk about his ears. The second section took shape, as we have seen, in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, after the publication of which in 1759 the plan of the lectures underwent a change, the ethical part being compressed and the economical part extended. The _Wealth of Nations_ covers the subject of police, revenue, and arms, and so executes the promise in part. “What remains,” he wrote in 1790, “the theory of Jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing.” In the lectures now discovered and published we have therefore a first draft of the _Wealth of Nations_ and also a first draft of the projected work on Justice, or Jurisprudence, “a sort of theory and history of law and government,” as he called it in a letter of 1785. How, then, comes it to pass that we possess these legal and economic lectures just as Smith delivered them to his class at Glasgow, in spite of Dugald Stewart’s express statement that no part of them had been preserved “excepting what he himself published in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and in _The Wealth of Nations_”? When Smith left Glasgow in 1764 his fame stood high, and probably there were many note-books containing his lectures floating about in the college. A good manuscript of useful lectures would pass from one student to another and might from time to time be found on a bookstall. In the session of 1762-3, or possibly of the previous year, an intelligent and attentive student took down Smith’s lectures with unusual accuracy. At least one copy was taken of it after Smith had left the University; for the manuscript so happily preserved is dated 1766, is clear, well written, and free from abbreviations, while some of the mistakes are evidently misreadings and not mishearings. That this fair copy was not made by the student who took the original notes is further shown, says the editor, “by the fact that, though the original note-taker must have been able and intelligent, the transcription is evidently the work of a person who often did not understand what he was writing.”