James Gregorie, the third son of the minister of Drumoak, was certainly the cleverest member of that family. He was so clever that no one had any time to tell anything about him, except his achievements in pure mathematics and in the science of optics; and indeed from his earliest days his love for mathematics was such, that his pretty mother unwilling to wait till her boy was able to go to school taught him herself all she knew of geometry, sending him away when the time came to the Grammar School of Aberdeen already far ahead of his class. He studied at Marischal College, and took his degree (laureated is the pleasant Scottish word) along with Gilbert Burnet, the readable if imaginative historian, with whom likely enough he did not find much in common, representing as they almost did fact and fancy. Now their portraits hang side by side in the Picture Gallery—Gregorie’s grey and grave and stern, with an indication of what he was in the mathematical globe by his side—Burnet’s less severe, satisfied with himself, and a most prosperous portrait.
After the graduation James Gregorie gave himself up to his studies, and before he was twenty-four made his great discovery of the Reflecting Telescope. It was not a chance discovery, for indeed he only described, and never saw put together, the telescope which bears his name. Anyone can see them nowadays, for they are still used, and the beautiful one set up by James Short in Edinburgh, is as clear as the day it was made, and is not used now, only because a commoner one can do the work which it did for so many years in the Royal Observatory. To the uninitiated it has a great merit, for things present themselves through it as they appear to the naked eye, and not upside down as is the case with most of the great telescopes.
In 1663, his book entitled Optica Promota, which contained a description of his telescope, was published in London, and thither Gregorie went, hoping that by the assistance of a practical workman he might realise his ideal.
His book had been much read by mathematicians, and amongst others by John Collins, the Secretary to the Royal Society. We can picture then the mutual pleasure with which these two men met. It was in an alehouse, where possibly the jolly tavern keeper took the Aberdonian through the fumes of his stuffy parlour, and presented him to Master Collins as a likely friend for him; anyway, this was the beginning of a life-long friendship, and Collins, who had realised at once what a possibility lay in the proposed reflecting telescope, determined to have a glass made on the principles which Gregorie had suggested in his book. With this object in view, he took his new Scottish friend to the most skilled glass-grinder in London, but, alas! in vain. Mr Reeves could not overcome the difficulty of obtaining conoidal reflectors, but to the great mathematicians of that day, and it was a day of giants, the discovery was magnificent, and from the hands of astronomy’s master craftsman, the reflecting telescope emerged in 1668 in a more beautiful form, as Newton’s telescope.
Before Gregorie’s time, the telescopes in England were many of them immensely long, going up even to three hundred feet, and at this length they were hardly available for scanning the heavens. The new reflector brought the size down to six or nine feet, and the idea was so ingenious, that it made Gregorie famous, and what was more, opened the door for him to friendship with Newton and Collins, to acknowledgment as an original worker by Huygens, and awakened in the Father of the Catholic Church an apprehension that one Gregorie, a Scot and a heretic, might come to deserve the spiritual blight which he is empowered to give in placing a book on the Index! It was not so very long before, that Galileo—an earlier maker of telescopes—had been accused by the learned scribes and pharisees of his day, of magic. ‘Oh, my dear Kepler,’ says Galileo to his brother astronomer in one of his most amusing letters, ‘how I wish that we could have one hearty laugh together! Here at Padua is the principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and earnestly requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here? What shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly, and to hear the professor of philosophy in Pisa labouring before the Grand Duke with logical arguments, as with magical incantations, to charm the new planets out of the sky!’ It is well that Galileo laughed at this stage of his life; when he fell into the hands of the Inquisition it became no laughing matter, and even after he had renounced his views, he was subjected to many griefs, and to a long incarceration in an Italian prison.
In the fifty years which intervened between Galileo and James Gregorie, Louis, the great monarch of France, had taken science under his care, so the Inquisition was no longer available as a means of preventing the spread of original thought, and Gregorie, unsuspecting of the pope’s attitude towards him, went to very Padua itself, and stayed there for three years.
Padua, with its still colonnades and drowsy population, is visited now, not in the eager search for learning, but because of the pale frescoes with which Giotto had gifted it long before Gregorie was there, but in the seventeenth century, what other attractions drew men thither! Then such men as Riccioli, Manfredi and De Angelis were drawing the erudite from far and near to sit at their feet. Such men as Manfredi and De Angelis, who were they? Alas! they, the great mathematical champions of their day, have passed into oblivion, and are only remembered now, even in Padua, by the work of the masons who carved their names on the walls of the University.
‘In thine halls the lamp of learning
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way