Then it was that Thomas Reid and Gregory planned the Philosophical Society, which was nicknamed by the people who did not belong to it ‘the Wise Club.’ It met after five o’clock dinner at a queer little tavern called the Red Lion Inn. A paper was read and its subject discussed. There was wine on a side table, but no healths were allowed to be drunk, and at an early hour the discussions ended. Among the members were Gregory, Reid, David Skene, Gerard, and Beattie the poet, who became a great friend of Gregory’s. The evenings were merry and the little parlour of the inn echoed to many a peal of laughter. The commonest entry about Gregory is ‘discourse not readie,’ which his cousin the philosopher, who kept the minutes never failed to insert, and also for the benefit of the Society the fine was always claimed by the members present, and laughingly paid by the unready professor. On these nights when no essay was read the Society had to content itself with philosophic discussion, the nature of which was arranged at the previous meeting. There was for them always, however, one never failing subject in David Hume’s Sceptical Speculation. ‘Your company, although we are all good Christians, would be more acceptable than that of Athanasius,’ wrote Reid in 1763 to his great opponent, and it was true. To Gregory there were moreover fields for speculation on education, on what medicine had done for men, on the distinction between Wit and Humour, on agriculture, and in his two books which attained such popularity there are chapters which do nothing more than follow out the ideas which he uttered at the Philosophical Society. Many books had their origin in this club. Gerard’s on _Taste_, Beattie’s _Essay on Truth_, Campbell’s _Treatise on Miracles_, and _Philosophy of Rhetoric_, and John Gregory’s _Comparative View of Man and the Animal World_, all books with a great name in their day, but Gregory’s for one sadly uninteresting now, when his startling views upon education have been universally accepted, and there remains of what is unusual only pedantic comparison and prosy sentiment. It is forgotten that John Gregory was an innovator when he advocated keeping children warm and when he refused to recognise the necessity of the icy morning bath, which before his day was _de rigueur_ in every nursery. Long after his teaching days were over there were still found homes where his broad sensible views had not penetrated, and in the _Memoirs of a Highland Lady_ Miss Grant gives a terrible description of her own early days (1806).