1 24 HEROES OF INVENTION AND DISCO VER Y. 



became a pressing one with him. He passed with ease and 

 credit in the examination for his degree, and became a member 

 of the Royal College of Surgeons before he was nineteen years 

 of age. As he could not take his degree as a physician until 

 he was twenty-one, he returned for a time to Bathgate. He 

 entered college again in 1831, and became first assistant to 

 Dr. Gairdner in dispensary work, to whom he gave the 

 utmost satisfaction. In 1832 he received the degree of Doctor 

 of Medicine. Referring to this period of his life, long after- 

 wards, he said : " 'Tis fully forty years since I came first to 

 Edinburgh, and entered its university as a very, very young 

 and very solitary, very poor, and almost friendless student. . . . 

 ^or was my original ambition in any way very great After 

 obtaining my surgical diploma, I became a candidate for a 

 situation in the West of Scotland, for the attainment of which 

 I fancied I possessed some casual local interest. The situation 

 was surgeon to the small village of Inverkip, on the Clyde. 

 When not selected I felt perhaps a deeper amount of chagrin 

 and disappointment than I have ever experienced since that 

 date. If chosen, I would probably have been working there 

 as a village doctor still. But like many other men I have, in 

 relation to my whole fate in life, found strong reason to recog- 

 nise the mighty fact, that assuredly — 



' There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 

 Rough hew them how we will.' 



Yes, in the language of the French proverb, * Man proposes, 

 but God disposes.' " 



When his literary studies at the. university were finished, he 

 threw himself, heart and soul, into his medical studies. Dr. 

 John Thomson, an eminent physician, saw in young Simpson 

 a possible assistant, and engaged him at the modest salary cf 



