Sir David Gill, 
197 
career he spent a year at Besancon, in order to make himself thoroughly 
acquainted with all the details of clock-making. This action of his is 
typical of his whole life. 
But events were moving otherwise than turning this young man into 
a prosperous watchmaker. Gill having heard of the establishment of a 
time service at Edinburgh, thought it would be a good thing to introduce 
a similar service into Aberdeen. And so in 1863 — he was then barely 
twenty years of age — he brought his proposal for a more accurate time 
service before David Thomson, Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's 
College, Aberdeen. 
Thomson gave Gill a letter of introduction to Piazzi Smyth, then 
Astronomer Eoyal for Scotland. Thus armed, Gill proceeded to Edinburgh 
to make inquiry into the method of firing the time-gun there. Fortunately 
he was received at the old Calton Hill Observatory with every kindness, 
and no trouble was spared to show him every detail of the time-gun 
and time-ball service. 
"This," he says in his History of the Cape Observatory and of its 
observers, " was my first introduction to an astronomer and an observa- 
tory." It is noteworthy that Piazzi Smyth had been Maclear's assistant 
at the Cape before coming to Edinburgh, and thus Gill's first introduction 
to astronomers and observatories was to one intimately associated with 
the land w^here in after-years he spent the best and happiest days of his 
long life. 
On returning to Aberdeen Gill lost no time in carrying out his purpose. 
A portable transit instrument w^as unearthed from out the lumber-rooms 
of King's College, and once more erected on the solid masonry piers on 
which it had rested, unused, for many years. The instrument truly was a 
very imperfect one, but it is an old precept of astronomy that it is not the 
instrument that matters, but the man using it. 
A good sidereal clock, as well as a mean time clock, w^as set up beside 
the transit instrument. An electrical control of a new design was 
constructed by Gill himself, and thus Aberdeen, through the energy and 
determination of a young man, became possessed of an accurate time 
service. 
The experience thus gained drew Gill's mind irresistibly towards 
astronomy. In the garden of his father's house he erected a small 
observatory. His first instrument was a 12-inch silver-on-glass 
speculum, bought from a well-known amateur astronomer of that day, 
the Eev. Henry Cooper Key. The adjustments and mountings were 
constructed by a local firm from drawings made by Gill. It has been my 
hap to have met one w^ho assisted in the setting up of this now historic 
instrument, and the stories told of the impetuousness and inventiveness of 
the young astronomer are instructive as revealing how little folk like Gill 
