The manuscript consists of 192 leaves octavo size, bound in calf, with the signature of “J. A. Maconochie, 1811,” on the front cover. This Maconochie, or perhaps his father Allan, the first Lord Meadowbank, who was appointed professor of Public Law at Edinburgh in 1779, must have picked up the book, and it has remained in the possession of the family ever since. In 1876 Mr. Charles C. Maconochie rescued it from a garret-room, and in 1895 happened to mention it to Mr. Edwin Cannan, who thereupon undertook the task of editing it for the press—a task which he has performed to perfection. One result of this lucky discovery is to dispose of the legend that Adam Smith was little more than a borrower from the French school, a mere reflector of the Reflexions of Turgot. By examining the lectures we shall inform ourselves in the political wisdom which Adam Smith used to teach his fortunate class at Glasgow long years before he met Quesnai or Turgot, and longer still before the Reflexions began to appear in the _Éphémérides du Citoyen_. “Jurisprudence” was the title Adam Smith gave to this course of lectures, and he divided it under four heads: Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, taken in the order named. Natural Jurisprudence, he begins, is the science that inquires into the general principles which ought to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. It is, he says elsewhere in his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, “of all sciences by far the most important, but hitherto perhaps the least cultivated.” Grotius’s treatise on the Laws of War and Peace—“a sort of casuistical book for sovereigns and states”—was still, he thought, the most complete work on this subject. After Grotius came Hobbes, who, from an utter abhorrence of ecclesiasticism and bigotry, sought to establish a system of morals by which men’s consciences might be subjected to the civil power. Then after a few words on Puffendorf and Cocceii, Adam Smith explained his own classification as follows:— “Jurisprudence is the theory of the general principles of law and government. The four great objects of law are justice, police, revenue, and arms. “The object of justice is the security from injury, and it is the foundation of civil government. “The objects of police are the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness, if the two last were not too minute for a lecture of this kind. Under this head we will consider the opulence of a state. “For defraying the expenses of government, some fund must be raised. Hence the origin of revenue.... In general, whatever revenue can be raised most insensibly from the people ought to be preferred; and in the sequel it is proposed to be shown, how far the laws of Britain and of other European nations are calculated for this purpose.