Ixxiv PROCEEDINGS. 



work of the late Professor MacGregor, work for which, as we 

 all know, there was conferred on him the Fellowship of the 

 Royal Society. I confess that I, for one, do not know w^hich of 

 his researches won for MacGregor that blue ribbon in Science: 

 but I hope President MacKenzie will tell us about this, for 

 I believe that tHere has been no public acknowledgement of 

 the work and position of MacGregor since his death, if we 

 except an obituary notice of him which appeared in the Trans- 

 actions of this Institute. 



I remember well MacGregor being elected to the Chair 

 of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, a 

 chair made illustrious b}^ its having been held by Sir John 

 Leslie early in the 19th century and by Peter Guthrie Tait 

 in our own day. Dr. MacGregor was one of the last nien of 

 science of whom I took farewell in November, 1911, a few 

 days before I sailed for Canada. When I called on him, 

 though he was evidently busy, he showed me over the de- 

 partment which had been provided for him out of the building 

 that was formerly the Edinburgh Roj^al Infirmary. The fam- 

 ous "old Royal," the Infirmary of the second Monro, of 

 Syme and of Lister; the Infirmary where Henley the poet 

 lay convalescing when he wrote those virile lines on his sur- 

 geons and nurses. 



Knowing that I had just come from St. Andrews, the home 

 of the illustrious academic family of the Hunters. — my wife's 

 family, — to which Sir John Leslie was related, MacGregor drew 

 my attention to the instruments, carefully preserved, which 

 Leslie had used. There, reverently preserved in a kind of 

 museum, were his hygrometers and differential thermometers 

 and other apparatus with which Leslie investigated the pheno- 

 mena of the production of cold by artificial congelation, or 

 "Leslie's phenomenon" as it is sometimes called. 



Professor Tait, MacGregor's immediate predecessor, was 

 my own teacher in physics. MacGregor told me something 



