‘Mr. Watt has made two small improvements in the steam-engine.[13] [These are minutely described.] ... I have attended Dr. Black’s lectures. His doctrine of latent heat is the only thing I have yet heard that is altogether new. And indeed I look upon it as a very great discovery.... I have not met with any botanists here. Our College is considerably more crowded than it was last session. My class indeed is much the same as last year, but all the rest are better. I believe the number of our students of one kind or another may be between four and five hundred. But the College at Edinburgh is increased this year much more than we are. The Moral Philosophy class there is more than double ours. The Professor, Ferguson, is indeed, as far as I can judge, a man of a noble spirit, of very elegant manners, and has an uncommon flow of eloquence. I hear he is about to publish, I don’t know under what title, a natural history of man; exhibiting a view of him in the savage state, and in the several successive states of pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. Our Society [Senate] is not so harmonious as I wish. Schemes of interest, pushed by some and opposed by others, are like to divide us into parties, and perhaps engage us in law suits. Mrs. Reid, Pegie, and I, have all had a severe cold and cough. I have been keeping the house these two days in order to get the better of it.’ On ‘December 30th, 1765,’ a less sanguine view appears, in a letter to Andrew Skene:—