of Edinlurgli, Session 1882-83. 
3 
extent was the origin of the Royal Society. He had looked into 
the Appendix to Diigald Stewart’s Life of Robertson, and there he 
found a list of members of the Select Society — and it contained 
many, if not all, of the names of the great men who were in 1783 
among its members. One distinctive thing he could gather from 
the notice was, that Adam Smith and David Hume were both 
members of it, and that neither one nor the other ever opened their 
lips in the Society during the time they were members of it. But 
he rather thought a third institution had more claim, and that was 
the Philosophical Society, founded by Colin Maclaurin, the great 
mathematician. Undoubtedly it did survive till the period when 
the Royal Society was formed. Colin Maclaurin, unfortunately for 
himself, was the engineer employed to defend Edinburgh at the 
time of the advance of the Pretender in 1745, and he had to leave 
Edinburgh. Observations had sometimes been made as if Mac- 
laurin had made a somewhat precipitate retreat on that occasion, 
but the real fact was, he was the last man who left, for he found, 
after all the fortifications were complete, that there was nobody to 
man them, and no army to help in the defence. He was not the 
only man who had to retreat, for he rather thought the Court of 
Session also took that course, and before the Pretender arrived 
the Judges had departed to their country seats. Such was the 
parentage of the Royal Society. In 1783 these streams all seemed 
to meet, and this institution was the result. They had originally a 
literary side and a physical or mathematical side. At the first 
start they had 104 on the physical side and 114 members on the 
literary side. He was looking back to an address by his much 
valued and lamented friend Professor Eorbes, which was delivered 
in 1862, and he would go over a few names given there as belong- 
ing to the physical side and to the literary side, and they would 
probably agree with him (there were many more who might go 
alongside of them) that it would be difficult to find in any part of 
Britain, or in any country out of Britain, an assemblage of persons 
more distinguished in their respective spheres. The physical side 
embraced Joseph Black, Clerk of Eldin, Lord Hailes, James 
Gregory, James Hutton, John Playfair, Dugald Stewart, Lord 
Bute, Lord Dundonald, Sir James Hall, James Watt, Dr Small 
(Dundee), and Patrick Wilson. And on the literary side there were 
