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 men of the time in Scotland. I do not know how the intimacy began, but as early as 1767 we have found him referring to a visit to Lord Kames at Blair-Drummond, and to the mysteries of Barbara Celarent. This means that he was at work on the Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, with Remarks, published seven years afterwards as an Appendix to one of Lord Kames’ Sketches of the History of Man. The Sketches appeared in two quarto volumes, in 1774, and the Brief Account fills about seventy pages in the second volume. It was Reid’s only appearance in print in the sixteen years of his public professorship in Glasgow. This, along with the essay on Quantity, given to the Royal Society in 1748, and the Inquiry, in 1764, made up his work as an author, until after he had ceased to be an oral teacher.

In Henry Home, Lord Kames, notwithstanding a temperament very different from his own, Reid found congenial companionship—a strong disposition to metaphysical speculation, a ready and accomplished if not deeply learned lawyer, and a considerable author. Kames was fourteen years his senior. Curiously, Henry Home’s closest early friendship was with David Hume. Thirty years before his friendship with Reid, he advised Hume about the Treatise of Human Nature, and had given the youth an introduction to Bishop Butler. 'My opinions,' David writes in 1737, 'are so new, and even some terms I am obliged to make use of, that I could not propose, by any abridgment, to give my system an air of likelihood, or even to make it intelligible. I have had a greater desire of communicating to you a plan of the whole, that I believe it will not appear in public before the beginning of next winter. I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its nobler