The uncouth and dilapidated structure in which the University of the Earls Marischal was housed when young Reid was spending his undergraduate years in it, bore no resemblance to the stately College on the same site which now adorns the prosperous city of Bon Accord. The process of decay was so rapid, and the case was so urgent, that a few years later the regents suspended their official claim to a part of the scanty funds of the College, and also asked help from the community, ‘to preserve from ruin an university from whence so many accomplished men have gone forth as ornaments of their country in every age since its foundation.’ The troubles of 1715 had further reduced its resources. Its Chancellor, the tenth Earl Marischal, concerned in the rising of Mar, then forfeited his title and the official connection of his family with the academical foundation of his ancestor. The Principal and most of the authorities had been removed or suspended by a commission of visitation in 1717. During the two years which followed the adventure of Mar the doors of Marischal College were closed, so that, when public instruction was resumed in 1717, a new race of teachers was in possession, and, as it happened, an era of intellectual activity was inaugurated. Notwithstanding the humble accommodation which it offered, and the social revolution through which it had lately passed, Marischal College could then boast of at least three eminent teachers, imbued with the spirit of the ‘new philosophy,’ and of the reviving literary taste in Scotland. The Professor of Mathematics was Colin M’Laurin, brother of the eloquent Presbyterian preacher, himself among the foremost of British mathematicians, a friend and correspondent of the aged Newton, who, along with Reid’s inherited disposition, attracted the young student to the study in which the teacher was a master. And about the time when Reid entered College, Thomas Blackwell, a critic of Homer, and author of _Memoirs of the Court of Augustus_, prominent among his countrymen who were anxious to write good English, became Professor of Greek, and for a generation encouraged classical taste and love of literature in the north of Scotland. But the teacher who chiefly influenced Reid’s undergraduate life was George Turnbull, a copious author, though his books are little remembered now. He was Reid’s guide for three years; for the College was then under a system of ‘regents’ which intrusted the student to the same teacher in all the three years given to ‘philosophy’—natural as well as moral.