4 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



Fergusson, it places on record the life history of a class of boys which 

 began its corporate existence in the winter of 1841. 



Peter Guthrie Tait was one of this class, which at the start numbered 

 some sixty lads all about ten years of age. The reason for this great 

 gathering of the first year or " Geits 1 " class was the popularity of the 

 master, James Gumming. According to the custom then holding in Edinburgh 

 Academy, each master began in rotation with the first year's scholars and 

 carried them on for four years under his exclusive instruction in classical 

 studies. For the remaining three years of the regular curriculum the boys, 

 although coming directly under the care of the Rector, still continued to 

 spend some hours of tuition with the master who had trained them from 

 the first. When in accordance with the routine of the school the time 

 came for Mr Gumming to start the new first year, his fame as a teacher 

 drew an unusually large number of boys. 



Of the members of this particular Gumming class as many as twenty- 

 seven entered "the Services at an important juncture in the history of our 

 country," and won thirty-nine military honours including six British and 

 Foreign Knightly Orders. This was the class in which Tait was through- 

 out his schooldays the "permanent dux." In 1850 the surviving members 

 of the class formed themselves into a club called the Gumming Club, which 

 met for good fellowship year by year. 



In Colonel Fergusson's brightly written chronicle we find a perfect 

 picture of the school life in Edinburgh during the early part of last century. 

 Especially are we introduced to the masters who helped to mould the mind 

 of P. G. Tait. Tait himself had many reminiscences of his schoolmasters; 

 and for James Gumming, the classical master, and James Gloag, who gave 

 him his first acquaintance with mathematics, he retained always the greatest 

 admiration and respect. So thoroughly was Tait taught the classics that 

 (as he once told me) he never required to turn up a Greek Lexicon all 

 the time he was at school. This no doubt was largely due to the pupil's 

 own extraordinary verbal memory ; but the master who could teach with 

 such results must have been to the manner born. 



Gloag was a teacher of strenuous character and quaint originality a type 

 familiar enough in Scotland before School Boards and Leaving Certificates 

 cooperated to mould teachers after the same type. With him mathematics 



1 In Jamieson's Dictionary of the Scottish Language, geit, gett, gyte, variously spelt, is 

 denned as "a contemptuous name for a child." Compare modern "kid." 



