In December he gave his inaugural address in Latin, on an Analysis of Geometrical Progress. The lecture has been lost, but a volume of notes of his usual course of teaching is preserved in the University Library, and its range is very large. As has already been said, what chiefly distinguished David Gregorie was his appreciation of Newton’s ideas. It was his object to bring down the _Principia_ to the average level of mathematical minds, and both he and his brother James, who held the corresponding chair at St Andrews, were teaching Newton’s philosophy before it was taught at Cambridge. ‘It was not long,’ says Whiston, ‘before I with immense pains, but no assistance, set myself with the utmost zeal to the study of Sir Isaac Newton’s wonderful discoveries in his _Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica_, one or two of which lectures I had heard him read in the publick schools, though I understood them not at all at that time, being indeed greatly excited thereto by a paper of Dr Gregory’s when he was professor in Scotland; wherein he had given the most prodigious commendations to that work, as not only right in all things, but in a manner the effect of a plainly divine genius, and had already caused several of his scholars to keep acts, as we call them, upon several branches of the Newtonian Philosophy, while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious hypothesis of the Cartesian.’ Voltaire wrote of Sir Isaac Newton, that when he died he had not more than twenty followers in his own country; and, even making allowance for the unfriendly eyes with which the Frenchman regarded his contemporaries, there was probably some truth in the statement. Whiston was professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and writing from that University, where of all places in the world Newton’s doctrines should have been earliest taught, it is curious that he should have to acknowledge that he got his inspiration from Scotland. In 1684 Professor Gregorie produced his first work, which was entitled _Exercitatio Geometrica de Dimensione Figurarum, sive Specimen Methodi Generalis [dimetiendi] Quasvis Figuras_. In it he makes much reference to the speculations of his uncle, to whom he was at least partially indebted for his materials, and there is little, if any, original work. The book was not widely read, but it was said to have given ‘a public proof of his competency to discharge the duties of the important office to which he had been appointed.’ David Gregorie was appointed in 1683 in the reign of Charles II., but during his six years in the professoriate many changes had come about. William and Mary were on the throne, and not unnaturally it was considered necessary by the new Government that steps should be taken to ascertain the political opinion of those men to whom was entrusted the instruction of the youth of the land. * * * * * At Edinburgh,