His imagination was fed with the legends of the district and tales of his remote moss-trooper ancestors told to him of an evening by his father. Though happily saved from being a bookworm to the exclusion of sounder means for acquiring knowledge, he devoured and digested every scrap of literature which came in his way. Like all Scots children of his class he learnt his Bible thoroughly from end to end--a knowledge which served him well in later years. Shakespeare followed the Bible in his own review of his favourite reading as a boy; but a gazetteer or an almanac was quite as acceptable. His taste was for solid fact--fact which he could learn and put to the test; thus the great open book of Nature was the attraction he most readily yielded to. But nothing in book form ever came amiss to him; if between the covers there was useful information to be had, Simpson extracted it and stored it away in his capacious brain. The unusually large size of his head, a source of admiration in manhood, was in childhood an object of wonder to observers. In manhood he wore his hair in long locks, and this was apparently his habit in boyhood. Once a strange barber cut his hair so close that his brother took upon himself to go and rebuke the man. "The callant had suck a muckle head," was the retort, "I was doin' my best to mak' it look respectable." A close-cropped head gave altogether a too sportive appearance to the "young philosopher" in the eyes of the watchful elder brother. There is no evidence that Simpson displayed in his schooldays any special leaning towards the medical profession; it cannot be reasonably urged that his grandfather's rough skill in the treatment of animals fostered any medical tendency in him, for James was but five years old when the old man died. Even had he been of an age to understand them, the methods employed would have scarcely recommended themselves to a youth of Simpson's nature, sufficiently to raise a spirit of emulation within him. It is also not recorded that the village doctor took any special interest in the boy or brought any influence to bear upon him; although his note-book thus gives the earliest record of the future prince of obstetricians:-- 275.--June 7. Simpson, David, baker, Bathgate. Wife, Mary Jarvie. AE. 40. 8th child, son. _Natus_ 8 o'clock. _Uti veniebam natus._ Paid 10s. 6d.