Mrs Gregorie’s father, George Jameson the artist, drew the pictures for her. Walpole called him the ‘Van Dyck of Scotland,’ though it is difficult to know why, as there is really no resemblance in their work, but at least Jameson and Van Dyck were friends in Rubens’ studio, and the kindly appreciation of his fellow-citizens has remembered and repeated the phrase. In 1670, James Gregorie was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics in St Andrews, where he had a successful if sometimes vexed life. His duties were to deliver two lectures a week, and to answer any mathematical questions that might be set before him. ‘I am now much taken up,’ he writes in May, 1671, ‘and have been so all this winter by-past, both with my public lectures, which I have twice a week, and resolving doubts, which some gentlemen and scholars propose to me. This I must comply with, nevertheless that I am often troubled with great impertinences, all persons here being ignorant of these things to admiration. These things do so hinder me, that I have but little time to spend on these studies my genius leads me to.’ He lived near the beautiful cathedral and almost under the shadow of St Regulus, and there his name is still remembered in Gregorie’s Lane and Gregorie’s Place. He worked in the long, many-windowed library, where the clock which he used is still at work, and where it has been keeping time these two hundred years, since Huygens, who invented the use of the pendulum in clocks, and Gregorie himself were laid at rest.