‘MUCH HONOURED SIR,—I received some days ago your very obliging letter, and not long after your arrival at Paris I had another from you, to which the truth is I was ashamed to answer, the affairs of the St Andrews Observatory were in such a bad condition, the reason of which was the prejudice the masters of the University did take at the mathematics, because some of their scholars finding their courses and dictates opposed by what they had studied in the mathematics, did mock at their masters, and deride some of them publicly. After this the servants of the college got orders not to wait on me or my observations, my salary was also kept back from me, and scholars of most eminent rank were violently kept from me, contrary to their own and their parents’ wills, the masters persuading them that their brains were not able to endure it. These and many other discouragements oblige me to accept of a call here to the College of Edinburgh, where my salary is here double, and my encouragements much greater.’ * * * * * Gregorie left St Andrews somewhat under a cloud, because, as we have good reason to suppose, he had been teaching Newton’s Philosophy before the Kingdom of Fife was quite ready for it, and because, too, his students had more ardour than wisdom in their minds. But in Edinburgh he had a great reception. The hall where he gave his inaugural address, in November 1674, was crowded, and he was given perfect freedom in what he taught. In his observatory he passed many happy hours, and often at nights he would take his students to look through the telescope at the stars, to find out belted Saturn and Jupiter with his satellites, which was not such a nursery affair then as it is now. These phenomena had only been discovered fifty years before, for let us remember James Gregorie lived in the days of Charles the Second, and just missed by a few years being Samuel Rutherfurd’s fellow-citizen in St Andrews. The last scene in his life comes all too soon, and before he had been a year in Edinburgh his place was vacant. On an October evening while he was showing his students the satellites of Jupiter, a sudden blindness came on, and within a few days everything was over. He probably died of Bright’s disease. It seems to us on looking back, as if the active mind had worked too quickly. Gregorie was only thirty-six, but he had already done a full life’s work in science. Mengoli, Newton, Huygens, and even Leibnitz (who for some time claimed Gregorie’s series for his own) have borne witness to his power. In truth there was something in him that inclined great men to love him, and his mathematics are so deep that it is only the master minds who appreciate him. He was a mathematician for mathematicians. There are many of Gregorie’s letters still extant, and for the pure pleasure of reading one just as he wrote it, this letter written to the Rev. Coline Campbell is inserted.