But to return to what interests us about David Gregorie of Kinairdy, in connection with his many professorial sons and other kindred, he was a great lover of science, and a worker to whom all scientific matter came home to stay. His mathematical and mechanical gifts, great as they were—and we know he was far advanced in meteorological studies—were not to be compared with the power which he had, and which now appears for the first time in the Gregorie family—the inborn gift of doctoring. He had no training except what he gave himself, but he could no more help being a physician, than his brother Professor James could help his incessant work at mathematics. David and James Gregorie were the children of their mother far more than of their father; who, good as he probably was, is, we must confess, just a little dull. Yes, Janet Anderson, you have lived again for us in your sons! CHAPTER III JAMES GREGORIE, 1638–1675 ‘He learned the art In Padua far beyond the sea.’ —SCOTT, _Lay_ 1, xi. James Gregorie, the third son of the minister of Drumoak, was certainly the cleverest member of that family. He was so clever that no one had any time to tell anything about him, except his achievements in pure mathematics and in the science of optics; and indeed from his earliest days his love for mathematics was such, that his pretty mother unwilling to wait till her boy was able to go to school taught him herself all she knew of geometry, sending him away when the time came to the Grammar School of Aberdeen already far ahead of his class. He studied at Marischal College, and took his degree (laureated is the pleasant Scottish word) along with Gilbert Burnet, the readable if imaginative historian, with whom likely enough he did not find much in common, representing as they almost did fact and fancy. Now their portraits hang side by side in the Picture Gallery—Gregorie’s grey and grave and stern, with an indication of what he was in the mathematical globe by his side—Burnet’s less severe, satisfied with himself, and a most prosperous portrait. After the graduation James Gregorie gave himself up to his studies, and before he was twenty-four made his great discovery of the Reflecting Telescope. It was not a chance discovery, for indeed he only described, and never saw put together, the telescope which bears his name. Anyone can see them nowadays, for they are still used, and the beautiful one set up by James Short in Edinburgh, is as clear as the day it was made, and is not used now, only because a commoner one can do the work which it did for so many years in the Royal Observatory. To the uninitiated it has a great merit, for things present themselves through it as they appear to the naked eye, and not upside down as is the case with most of the great telescopes.