176 Biographical Account of (Marca, 
Thus disappointed in his hopes, Mr. Robison resolved on return- 
ing to Glasgow, in’ order to qualify himself for entering into the 
church. Indeed, the idea of prosecuting his original destination 
seems often to have occurred to him, even when’ his views appeared 
to have a very different direction. When he left the Royal William, 
in 1761, he was not without serious intentions of resuming the 
study of theology. This appears both from a letter he wrote to his 
father about that time, and from one which he himself received 
from young Knowles, who rallies him on his new profession, and 
on the singularity of having acquired a taste for theological studies 
in the ward-room of a man of war. When he undertook the 
voyage to Jamaica he would have wished to have had the patronage 
of his employers for obtaining some ecclesiastical preferment rather 
than naval ; and only agreed to the latter as it lay more in the way 
of the Board of Longitude to help one to promotion in the navy 
than in the church. It appears that he had never ceased to express 
to Dr. Blair a desire of assuming the clerical character; and he 
actually had from that Gentleman the offer of a curacy in a living 
of his own, to which, however, the emolument annexed was so 
small that, after consultation with his father, he declined accepting 
of it. 
But however Mr. Robison’s views may have varied, to one object 
he steadily adhered, viz. the cultivation of science, and the acqui- 
sition of whatever knowledge the situations he was placed in 
brought within his reach. 
He returned, therefore, to Glasgow; and a man whose object 
was the prosecution of science could not arrive at any place in a 
more auspicious moment, as that city was about to give birth to two 
of the greatest improvements which in the 18th century have dis- 
tinguished the progress either of the sciences or the arts. ‘The one 
of these was the discovery of latent heat, by the late Dr. Black; 
the other was the invention of what may be properly called a new 
steam-engine, by Mr. Watt. The former of these eminent men 
was then the Lecturer on Chemistry in the University, and had just 
been led, by a train of most ingeniously contrived experiments, to 
the knowledge of a principle which seemed to promise better for an 
explanation of the process which takes place when heat is communi- 
cated to bodies than any thing yet known in chemistry, viz. that 
when water passes from a solid fo a fluid state, as much of its heat 
disappears as would have raised its temperature, had it remained 
Solid, 140° higher than that which it actually possesses. Mr. 
Robison was already known to Dr. Black, having been introduced 
to him before he left Glasgow ; but at that time he had not studied 
Robison, but such a’one as he could have no temptation to accept. In 1763, when 
Lord Sandwich was First Lord of. the Admiralty, his solicitations were so far 
listened to that he was appointed to the Aurora, of 40 guns, then on the stocks. 
As the ship must be long of being in commission, and the pay of the Purser, in 
the aren time, yery inconsiderable, Mr. Robisov declined accepting this appoint- 
ment, 
