Page:Thomas Reid (Fraser 1898).djvu/19

, first at St. Andrews and then at Edinburgh, inventor of the reflecting telescope, also Newton’s friend and correspondent, who introduced the science of Newton into the Universities of Scotland. It is of him that Whiston writes from Cambridge:—'He had already caused several of his students to keep acts upon several branches of the Newtonian philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious hypotheses of the Cartesian.' His son James became in 1725 Professor of Medicine in King's College, Aberdeen, a considerable local figure. He had two sons: James, who succeeded his father, and John, a regent of philosophy in his father’s college, afterwards Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh, and remembered as the author of A Comparative View of Man and the Animal World, and A Father’s Legacy, books full of good sense. Dr. John Gregory’s son, James, was Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh from 1776 till 1821, a physician and a metaphysician—in the sequel, the intimate friend and correspondent of Thomas Reid, and the patron of Thomas Brown. Of his family, one son held the Chair of Chemistry in King’s College, and afterwards in Edinburgh till his death in 1858; another, Donald, was an eminent archæologist, author of the History of the Western Highlands and Islands; a third died in high mathematical repute at Cambridge, returning to the original bent of this extraordinary family, in which the disposition to mathematics had latterly been overborne by medicine and moral philosophy. Even this long list of names omits scientific celebrities who were descended from the minister of Drumoak and his wife, Margaret Anderson, more remotely still from the wild clan Gregor of Glenlyon and Glenorchy.