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 two sons of the Earl of Warwick. In 1764, in a series of professorial changes (see account of them in, ii. 315, 339, 350), Ferguson was appointed to the chair in Edinburgh which he had long coveted, that of ‘pneumatics and moral philosophy,’ pneumatics being used in its now obsolete sense of mental philosophy. His earnestness and eloquence made him a very popular professor, and his lectures were attended by many non-academic hearers belonging to the upper ranks. In time he thus derived from the chair an annual income of 300l., though the salary attached to it was only 100l. a year (Letter to Adam Smith in, p. 17). In 1766 he married Miss Katherine Burnett, an Aberdonian lady, and niece of Joseph Black the chemist, who was a relative of Ferguson on the mother's side.

Ferguson had completed in 1759 an essay on refinement, which, it has been surmised, he incorporated in his ‘Essay on Civil Society,’ published in 1766. The essay on refinement David Hume praised highly, but recommended the suppression of the ‘Essay on Civil Society.’ Nevertheless he reported faithfully from London the very favourable verdict pronounced on it by Lords Shelburne, Mansfield, Chesterfield, Lyttelton, and Bute, and by Charles Townshend, who had ‘read it five times over’ ( in Supplement to Encyclopædia Britannica;, ii. 385–6). The poet Gray (see Works, ed. Gosse, iii. 279–80 and note) found in it ‘an uncommon strain of eloquence’ among other merits, and Baron d'Holbach lauded it in a letter to Ferguson. In the year of its publication the university of Edinburgh conferred on its author the degree of LL.D., and Lord Shelburne thought of offering to Ferguson the governorship of West Florida. It reached a seventh edition in 1814. A French translation of it by Bergier and Meusnier appeared in Paris in 1783; a German, by C. F. Jünger, at Leipzig in 1768. Ferguson professed himself in it a modest follower of Montesquieu, and, like his master, he viewed the development of society from an historical standpoint, discarding Hobbes's and Rousseau's theories of primitive man, whose analogue Ferguson found in the ‘Arab clan’ and North American Indian of the eighteenth century. The essay is desultory and inconclusive.

In 1761 Ferguson had issued a syllabus of his lectures, entitled ‘Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy for the use of Students in the College of Edinburgh.’ The notes from which he delivered his lectures were more amply reproduced in his ‘Institutes of Moral Philosophy,’ a volume issued in 1772, of which a second edition appeared in 1773, a third edition ‘enlarged’ in 1785, a ‘new’ edition at Basel in 1800, a German translation by C. Garve at Leipzig in 1772, with an appendix of comments by the translator, which Schiller knew by heart (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, art. ‘Christian Garve’). A Russian translation of it is said to have been a text-book in Russian universities. In 1773, with a somewhat diminishing income, Ferguson accepted an offer, made at the recommendation of Adam Smith, to travel on the continent with Charles, third earl of Chesterfield, receiving an allowance of 400l. a year during the tour, and after it an annuity of 200l. for life. The Edinburgh town council refused his request to be allowed to appoint a substitute during his temporary absence from his chair, and when, after the winter session of 1774, he joined his charge on the continent, they cancelled his appointment and elected another professor. After instituting legal proceedings and being reinstalled, Ferguson returned to Edinburgh in 1776. In a letter to Dr. Carlyle he gave an entertaining and rather satirical account of a visit to Voltaire at Ferney, who, he says, ‘saluted me with a compliment on a gentleman of my family who had civilised the Russians.’ Voltaire no doubt had in view the career of another and earlier Scotch Ferguson, or Fergusson, whom in his history of Russia under Peter the Great (Œuvres, ed. 1877–85, xvi. 460, 481) he describes as helping Peter to calculate eclipses, and as establishing at Moscow schools of geometry, astronomy, and navigation. In 1776 appeared anonymously, and printed at the expense of the government, Ferguson's ‘Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, entitled “Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty,”’ &c. Ferguson proposed conciliatory measures though demanding concessions from the colonists. In 1778 he accompanied to Philadelphia the new British commissioners sent to negotiate a settlement, and soon after their arrival he was appointed their secretary. Washington refused him a passport with which to proceed to congress. The negotiations coming to nothing, he returned home with the commissioners at the end of 1778, and resumed the duties of his chair, which during his absence had been discharged by his former pupil, Dugald Stewart. The company of Ferguson, as ‘a man of the world and a high-bred gentleman,’ was much sought for, according to Dr. Carlyle, who adds that he ‘conversed fluently but with dignified reserve,’ and that he ‘possessed a boundless vein of humour.’ Conviviality had not injured his health until about his fiftieth year, when