retain the old and include the new. Its fine old gateway, and part of one of the courts, were still a quaint adornment of the somewhat squalid street in 1871, after the University had moved to its present situation on the windy top of Gilmorehill. Deserted as it was, its old walls told something of the history of the past, and reminded the passer-by that learning had flourished amid the shops and booths of the townspeople, and that students and professors had there lived and worked within sound of the shuttle and the forge. The old associations of a town or a street or a building, linked as they often are with the history of a nation, are a valuable possession, not always placed in the account when the advantages or disadvantages of proposed changes are discussed; but a University which for four hundred years has seen the tide of human life flow round it in a great city, is instinct with memories which even the demolition of its walls can only partially destroy. Poets and statesmen, men of thought and men of action, lords and commoners, rich men's sons and the children of farmers, craftsmen and labourers, had mingled in its classes and sat together on its benches; and so had been brought about a community of thought and feeling which the practice of our modern and wealthy cosmopolites, who affect to despise nationality, certainly does nothing to encourage. In the eighteenth century the Provosts and the Bailies of the time still dwelt among men and women in the High Street, and its continuation the Saltmarket, or not far off in Virginia Street, the home of the tobacco lords and the West India merchants. Their homely hospitality, their cautious and at the same time splendid generosity, their prudent courage, and their faithful and candid friendships are depicted in the pages of Scott; and though a change in men and manners, not altogether for the better, has been gradually brought about by sport and fashion, those peculiarly Scottish virtues are still to be found in the civic statesmen and merchant princes of the Glasgow of to-day. Seventy years ago the great migration of the well-to-do towards the west had commenced, but it had but little interfered with the life of the High Street or of the College. Now many old slums besides the Vennel and the Havannah have disappeared, much to the credit of the Corporation of Glasgow; and, alas, so has every vestige of the Old College, much to the regret of all who remember its quaint old courts. A railway company, it is to be supposed, dare not possess an artistic soul to be saved; and therefore, perhaps, it is that it builds huge and ugly caravanserais of which no one, except perhaps the shareholders, would keenly regret the disappearance. But both artists and antiquaries would have blessed the directors—and such a blessing would have done them no harm—if they had been ingenious and pious enough to leave some relic of the old buildings as a memorial of the old days and the old life of the High Street.

A picture of the College in the High Street has recently been drawn by one who lived and worked in it, though some thirty years after James Thomson brought his family to live in its courts. Professor G. G. Ramsay has thus portrayed some features of the place, which may interest those who would like to imagine the environment in which Lord Kelvin grew up from childhood, until, a youth of seventeen, he left Glasgow for Cambridge.4 "There was something in the very disamenities of the old place that created a bond of fellowship among those who lived and worked there, and that makes all old students, to this day, look back to it with a sort of family pride and reverence. The grimy, dingy, low-roofed rooms; the narrow, picturesque courts, buzzing with student-life; the dismal, foggy mornings and the perpetual gas; the sudden passage from the brawling, huckstering High Street into the academic quietude, or the still more academic hubbub, of those quaint cloisters, into which the policeman, so busy outside, was never permitted to penetrate; the tinkling of the 'angry bell' that made the students hurry along to the door which was closed the moment that it stopped; the roar and the flare of the Saturday nights, with the cries of carouse or incipient murder which would rise into our quiet rooms from the Vennel or the Havannah; the exhausted lassitude of Sunday mornings, when poor slipshod creatures might be seen, as soon as the street was clear of churchgoers, sneaking over to the chemist's for a dose of laudanum to ease off the debauch of yesterday; the conversations one would have after breakfast with the old ladies on the other side of the Vennel, not twenty feet from one's breakfast-table, who divided the day between smoking short cutty pipes and drinking poisonous black tea—these sharp contrasts bound together the College folk and the College students, making them feel at once part of the veritable populace of the city, and also hedged off from it by separate pursuits and interests."

The university removed in 1871 to larger and more airily situated buildings in the western part of the city. Round these have grown up, in the intervening thirty-eight years, new buildings for most of the great departments of science, including a separate Institute of Natural Philosophy, which was opened in April 1907, by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

CHAPTER II

CLASSES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. FIRST SCIENTIFIC PAPERS

In 1834, that is at the age of ten, William Thomson entered the University classes. Though small in stature, and youthful even for a time when mere boys were University students, he soon made himself conspicuous by his readiness in answering questions, and by his general proficiency, especially in mathematical and physical studies. The classes met at that time twice a day—in mathematics once for lecture and once for oral examination and the working of unseen examples by students of the class. It is still matter of tradition how, in his father's class, William was conspicuous for the brilliancy of the work he did in this second hour. His elder brother James and he seem to have gone through their University course together. In 1834-5 they were bracketed third in Latin Prose Composition. In 1835-6 William received a prize for a vacation exercise—a translation of Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods "with full parsing of the first three Dialogues." In 1836-7 and 1837-8 the brothers were in the Junior and Senior Mathematical Classes, and in each year the first and the second place in the prize-list fell to William and James respectively. In the second of these years, William appears as second prizeman in the Logic Class, while James was third, and John Caird (afterwards Principal of the University) was fifth. William and James Thomson took the first and second prizes in the Natural Philosophy Class at the close of session 1838-9; and in that year William gained the Class Prize in Astronomy, and a University Medal for an Essay on the Figure of the Earth. In 1840-1 he appears once more, this time as fifth prizeman in the Senior Humanity Class.

In his inaugural address as Chancellor of the University, already quoted above, Lord Kelvin refers to his teachers in Glasgow College in the following words:

"To this day I look back to William Ramsay's lectures on Roman Antiquities, and readings of Juvenal and Plautus, as more interesting than many a good stage play that I have seen in the theatre....

"Greek under Sir Daniel Sandford and Lushington, Logic under Robert Buchanan, Moral Philosophy under William Fleming,