His widow and orphans were granted a pension by Charles II. of £40 a year Scots in recognition of what Gregorie had done in Scotland. No one could be found suitable to succeed him in the Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh. The authorities waited eight years before they made another appointment; and when the new professor came, he was also a Gregorie, a nephew of the late professor. His own son, too, held a chair, but that was in Aberdeen, and he was a professor of medicine.
CHAPTER IV
DAVID GREGORY, 1661–1708
‘Tycho Brahe was also one who used the sword, not to cut into flesh and bone, but to build up a plainer way among all the stars of heaven.’—Hans Andersen.
David Gregorie was the third son of his father and name-father, the Laird of Kinairdy. He was born in a house without the port in the Upper Kirkgate of Aberdeen, where the tradition of his birth lingered, and was indeed cherished many a year after the boy had grown to manhood, and had left his grey birthplace for the richer lands of the South.
The boy’s mother was, it may be remembered, Jean Walker, one of the Orchiston family, and the child was taught from his babyhood loyalty to the Stuarts and a passionate adherence to the episcopal form of church government and teaching, which he carried with him to the grave.
His education he began at the Grammar School, of which Robert Skene was the rector, and afterwards he studied either at Marischal College or King’s College. It was at the University of Edinburgh, however, where his uncle had had such a brilliant if short career, that he took his degree as Master of Arts in 1683. He was even as a student a man whose life was commented upon. People talked of his studiousness, of his joyful temper, and still more of his friendship with Dr Archibald Pitcairne, whose time was coming to make the tongues of Edinburgh wag. They really were wonderful friends. Pitcairne studied everything from sheer love of learning. He was educated in turn for the church, the law, and for medicine, and besides this he made a great excursion into the higher mathematics at the instigation of his friend. David Gregorie, on the other hand, was a pure mathematician, all else in his studies giving way to his love for his dear ‘Celestial Physicks.’ From his uncle, James, he had inherited a great number of mathematical manuscripts, and this inheritance was regarded by him with the deepest veneration. Some day he would edit all these papers, but meantime many happy hours were spent by these two friends going over the manuscripts. For David Gregorie there was moreover much to delight in, in every fresh discovery that came from the hands of Sir Isaac Newton. Soon he was as ardent an admirer of the philosopher as ever his uncle had been. If he were made a professor, Gregorie thought, he would admit none of the Cartesian fallacies, and already his appointment to the Chair of Mathematics was being discussed. At the age of twenty-two, then, and actually before David Gregorie had got his A.M. degree, he was appointed to this Chair in the Edinburgh University, an office which had not been filled up since his uncle’s death. Lectures had been given by a student called John Young, but he was only acting as mathematical tutor, filling the place temporarily, whereas when Gregory was appointed it was as professor, with a salary of £1000 (Scots).
In December he gave his inaugural address in Latin, on an Analysis of Geometrical Progress. The lecture has been lost, but a volume of notes of his usual course of teaching is preserved in the University Library, and its range is very large. As has already been said, what chiefly distinguished David Gregorie was his appreciation of Newton’s ideas. It was his object to bring down the Principia to the average level of mathematical minds, and both he and his brother James, who held the corresponding chair at St Andrews, were teaching Newton’s philosophy before it was taught at Cambridge. ‘It was not long,’ says Whiston, ‘before I with immense pains, but no assistance, set myself with the utmost zeal to the study of Sir Isaac Newton’s wonderful discoveries in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one or two of which lectures I had heard him read in the publick schools, though I understood them not at all at that time, being indeed greatly excited thereto by a paper of Dr Gregory’s when he was professor in Scotland; wherein he had given the most prodigious commendations to that work, as not only right in all things, but in a manner the effect of a plainly divine genius, and had already caused several of his scholars to keep acts, as we call them, upon several branches of the Newtonian Philosophy, while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious hypothesis of the Cartesian.’
Voltaire wrote of Sir Isaac Newton, that when he died he had not more than twenty followers in his own country; and, even making allowance for the unfriendly eyes with which the Frenchman regarded his contemporaries, there was probably some truth in the statement. Whiston was professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and writing from that University, where of all places in the world Newton’s doctrines should have been earliest taught, it is curious that he should have to acknowledge that he got his inspiration from Scotland.
In 1684 Professor Gregorie produced his first work, which was entitled Exercitatio Geometrica de Dimensione Figurarum, sive Specimen Methodi Generalis [dimetiendi] Quasvis Figuras. In it he makes much reference to the speculations of his uncle, to whom he was at least partially indebted for his materials, and there is little, if any, original work. The book was not widely read, but it was said to have given ‘a public proof of his competency to discharge the duties of the important office to which he had been appointed.’