Duncan Nairne died, and, in order that the semi class might be carried on at all, the Town Council had to elect a professor in his room. They chose Mr. Charles Lumsden, a young man who had been one of Rollock’s pupils at St. Andrews. The services of this, the third regent or Professor of Philosophy in the University, did not, however, outlast the remainder of the session in which he had been appointed. A College professorship was not then a post of such attraction that it could be thought strange that Mr. Lumsden should resign it when, in the following October, he received a call to be minister of Duddingston parish. By his resignation at that moment, however, the College would have been left crippled, had not two new regents been at once appointed. These new regents, chosen by competitive trial out of six candidates, were Mr. Adam Colt and Mr. Alexander Scrimgeour. The last of these, Scrimgeour, took charge of the new class of entrants or Bajans; as there had been no class of Bajans in the former year, the semi class was this year a blank; the former pupils of Lumsden and Nairne, now in the third or bachelor class, were entrusted to Mr. Colt; and Rollock himself, proceeding with the pupils who had already been continuously in his charge for three years, carried them through the last or magistrand class. In August 1587, six months after the execution of Queen Mary at Fotheringay, the fourth session of Edinburgh University was brought to a close by the first act of laureation or graduation in its annals. Forty-seven of Rollock’s pupils, who had remained with him steadily through the entire four years, were then made masters of arts,—a larger number than was to be seen at any subsequent graduation for more than half a century. The signatures of the forty-seven are still to be seen in the preserved graduation-book, appended to a copy of that Scottish Confession of the Reformed Faith to which it was the rule that all graduates should swear everlasting fidelity. Several of the names are those of persons afterwards of some note in Scotland. To three of them is affixed in the graduation-book, in later handwriting, the dreadful word _Apostata_, signifying that those three disciples of Rollock afterwards apostatised from the Protestant religion.