He was a delightful brother and a delightful friend. What he might have done as a mathematician had he but lived it is impossible to tell. As it is, a writer who has discussed the hereditary qualities of the family, speaks of the mathematical genius, which had lain dormant since the time of James Gregorie as ‘blazing forth’ again in Duncan Farquharson Gregory, and if this writer passes over such talents as those of David Gregory, the Savilian Professor at Oxford, he must have held the Fellow of Trinity in great honour. Another authority on the family, said that if Duncan Gregory were alive, which he might quite well be as far as dates are concerned, he would probably have been the most famous pure mathematician of the day. And a still greater testimony is that of Lord Kelvin, given at the Bristol meeting of the British Association in 1898, where in a paper on ‘Graphic Representations of the two Simplest Cases of a Single Wave,’ he referred to Gregory’s work on this subject. ‘Gregory,’ he said, ‘died too soon,’ and as he turned from the black-board on which he had been drawing some diagrams, he added, ‘we cannot tell what we might have known if Gregory had lived.’ His talent was appreciated when he lived, but the qualities to which his friends reverted with most tenderness were his unenvious appreciation of other men’s work, his sweetness and joyfulness, and the patience with which he bore his last long illness. CHAPTER XI RETROSPECT ‘Whatever he had in himself, he would fain have made out a hereditary claim for.’—LOCKHART, _Life of Scott_, ch. lxxxiv. When Pennant on his famous tour through Scotland, came to the dreary moorland below Craigroyston, he was filled with special interest by the scene. Here, he was told, was the cradle of the M’Gregors, a clan so devoid of kindness, that they had been hunted down like wild beasts, their name suppressed and their remnant dispersed like Jews over the country. ‘And even now,’ he added, ‘their posterity are still said to be distinguished among the clans in which they have incorporated themselves, not only by the redness of their hair, but by their still retaining the mischievous disposition of their ancestors.’ What then, would Pennant have said, could he have known that from one descendant of a MacGregor would arise a family, thirteen of whom would be mentioned in the Encyclopædias of 1900? After all it should be remembered that even Rob Roy’s literary tastes have never been sufficiently appreciated, for his name is found in the original list of the subscribers to Keith’s _History of the Affairs of Church and State in Scotland_, published in 1734!