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 position. In his sixteenth year he was sent to the university of St. Andrews, where, it is said, his Latin procured him a bursary. He took his M.A. degree 4 July 1742, with a reputation for proficiency in classics, mathematics, and metaphysics. Intended by his father for the church, he entered in the same year the Divinity Hall at St. Andrews, but not long afterwards he removed to Edinburgh to pursue his divinity studies there, and became intimate with John Home and Robertson among other young men afterwards distinguished. According to his son, Sir Adam (Chambers's Journal for 24 Feb. 1855, article ‘A School Friend of Sir Walter Scott’), he acted in 1742 as private secretary to Lord Milton, who managed Scotch affairs for Lord Islay, afterwards third duke of Argyll. In 1745 he was appointed deputy-chaplain to the Black Watch, then the 43rd regiment, afterwards (, i. 274) the famous 42nd, at the instance (, p. 282) of the Dowager Duchess of Atholl, whose husband had presented his father to Logierait, and who wished Ferguson to exercise control over his son, Lord John Murray, its colonel. His chief ostensible qualification for the post was a knowledge of Gaelic, which would have shortened by two the six years of the Divinity Hall required before ordination. The general assembly forgave him two years more in consideration of his character and testimonials. Soon afterwards he became chaplain of the regiment, with which he was present at the battle of Fontenoy (11 May 1745). According to Sir Walter Scott (Quarterly Review for June 1827, art. ‘John Home;’ Miscellaneous Works, xix. 331), who probably heard the story from his friend Adam, Ferguson's son, the commanding officer was astonished to see the chaplain at the head of the column with a drawn broadsword in his hand, and remarked that his commission did not entitle him to assume such an attitude. ‘D—n my commission!’ was Ferguson's reply, throwing it towards the colonel. But by General Stewart (ii. appendix, p. liii) he is represented as meeting the remonstrance with the reply that he was there, not to fight, but to succour the wounded and to pray with the dying. According to the same authority Ferguson acquired an ‘unbounded ascendency’ over the soldiers of his regiment. He returned to England in 1745, and in 1746 there was published in London ‘A Sermon preached in the Erse Language to his Majesty's First Highland Regiment of Foot, commanded by Lord John Murray, on the 18th day of December 1745, being appointed as a Solemn Fast. By the Rev. Adam Ferguson, chaplain to the said regiment, and translated by him into English for the use of a lady of quality now in Scotland, at whose desire it is now published.’ The ‘lady’ was the Dowager Duchess of Atholl, and the sermon was a vigorous denunciation of the Pretender, of popery, and of France. Ferguson chiefly remained as chaplain with his regiment at home and abroad until about 1754, when, partly out of disgust at the seventh Duke of Atholl's refusal to present him to a Perthshire living, he abandoned the clerical profession.

In January 1757 Ferguson succeeded his friend David Hume in the librarianship of the Advocates' Library, of which the annual salary was 40l., and which he did not hold for a year, having after settling in Edinburgh undertaken the education of Lord Bute's sons. In the probably apocryphal account of the rehearsal of John Home's ‘Douglas’ by notable Edinburgh amateurs, Ferguson is represented as performing the part of Lady Randolph. To the Douglas controversy of 1757 he contributed a pamphlet on ‘The Morality of Stage Plays,’ which he defended as indirectly sanctioned in scripture and directly by fathers of the church. In the summer of 1758 David Hume entered into a curious and unsuccessful negotiation to effect the resignation of a professor in Edinburgh University, one of the results of which would have been to make Ferguson succeed Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow (, pp. 8–9;, ii. 45). On the death of the professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh University Ferguson was appointed to that chair, 4 July 1759. The class was to meet in October, and in the brief interval Ferguson acquired a sufficient knowledge of physics to discharge his duties satisfactorily, a feat which led David Hume to pay him a somewhat ironical compliment on his extraordinary genius. He published a pamphlet on the Scottish militia, followed by another on the injustice of the refusal of parliament to sanction the establishment of such a force. It was written in imitation of Arbuthnot, and appearing in 1761 with the title, ‘The History of the Proceedings in the case of Margaret, commonly called Peg, only sister to John Bull, Esq.,’ excited a good deal of attention. In 1762 Ferguson was one of the founders of a club, at first without a name, formed to keep astir the movement for the establishment of a Scotch militia, and which became famous as the Poker Club, a name suggested by Ferguson as having for its members an obvious meaning, while to others enigmatic (, p. 137 and note). In 1763 he was entrusted with the education of