WILLIAM GREGORY, 1803–1858
‘Were it of hoot, or cold, or moyste, or drye,
And where they engendered and of what humour,
He was a verray parfit praktisour.’
—CHAUCER, _Prologue_ 420–422.
William Gregory was the last of this great academic family to hold a
chair in a Scottish University.
He was the fourth son of Professor James Gregory, and having been
brought up among the traditions of medicine, he turned to the study of
it instinctively, though the necessity laid upon him was by no means the
same as that which had made his forefathers physicians in spite of
themselves. He had not gone far in his medical course when he decided to
be a chemist rather than a doctor. The magic of Professor Hope’s
experiments made at least one convert and as he sat in the class-room
observing the strange effects of chemicals, he made up his mind that if
it were possible he would some day take the teacher’s place. With rude
implements he would spend hours at home repeating the processes which he
had watched in the class, his mind all alive to the interest of his
subject, and his poor body much neglected. These happy hours in his
laboratory were dearly paid for by the delicacy, which began to show
itself about this time. The noxious fumes of the chemicals acted as a
slow poison, and from this stage of his life he had to struggle with ill
health, all his occupations being interrupted at times by unconquerable
pain.
He graduated M.D. in 1828, and then went abroad to study chemistry in
the famous schools of the continent. At Giessen, the most important of
these, he had the good fortune to attract the attention of the great
teacher, whose work had made the university famous, and from this time
forward, Liebig was the friend and correspondent of William Gregory.
During the years when Gregory was completing his studies abroad, and
teaching successively in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin, King’s College,
Aberdeen, was going through considerable difficulties in connection with
the post of mediciner. In the days of John Gregory’s tenure of that
office, he had as we already know, made efforts to improve the medical
curriculum there, but without success. A step in advance was made in
1801, when it was determined that a candidate for the degree of M.D.
must ‘oblidge himself that he is not, nor will be concerned in the sale
of quack medicines of any description!’ and a further step was taken in
1817 by the authorities insisting on a satisfactory account of the
‘classical, literary and scientifical education of the candidate.’
Between 1824 and 1826, an attempt was made by the Chancellor and Senatus
to insist that the mediciner should teach medicine, but Dr Bannerman,
who then held that office, would only consent to consider the matter for
a year, and after that time he let it rest. In 1836, he was advised that
if he would neither teach nor appoint a substitute, a lecturer would be
chosen, and paid out of his salary. This threat, however, was never
carried out, and he died in 1838, and it was to this post of mediciner,
made vacant by his death, that William Gregory was appointed on February
19th, 1839.
Dr William Pulteney Alison, to whom the electors of King’s College
applied for suggestions as to a suitable candidate, had curiously enough
never mentioned the name of his cousin, and it was only owing to the
intervention of Thomas Clark who held the Chair of Chemistry in
Marischal College that Gregory came to apply. After giving him minute
instructions as to the form which his application must take, he added,
‘Don’t mention me no more than the Devil.’ The name of this friend was
therefore kept out of sight, and Gregory was in due course appointed to
the vacant professorship. It was with great joy that his advent was
announced to the professors of King’s College. Their difficulties in
improving the medical course, when the very mediciner would not teach a
class, had been insuperable, but now they felt a man of influence was
coming amongst them, who would be the means of promoting the interests
of their university, and who would give the benefit of a hereditary
power of teaching to the students, whom they felt sure his great name
would attract to their midst.
While in Aberdeen William Gregory became intensely interested in the
welfare of King’s College, and busied himself in trying to secure
revenue from the government to found new chairs, but in this he was
unsuccessful.
He taught Materia Medica in a house fitted up for a Medical School in
Kingsland Place, and he had a good class, but from the witticisms of the
students as to the effect of their professor’s preparation of muriate of
morphia it is evident that William Gregory’s physical weakness was
growing upon him, and that it was only with the most strenuous effort
that he could get to his class at ten o’clock.
As his power of walking failed him, the professor found much solace in
music, and sweet snatches of melody were carried across his
old-fashioned garden to the ears of passers-by. He played beautifully,
and his wife, who was a niece of Colonel Scott of Gala, added greatly to
the charms of their musical parties. It is said that they were the first
to shock the people of Aberdeen by playing secular music on Sunday.
To the Aberdonians, however, he gave a more serious cause for
complaint—William Gregory was of a singularly childlike and trustful
disposition, and he was intensely interested in the occult science of
Spiritualism; the result was that he became the patron of a most
undesirable throng of quasi-scientific humbugs, whose presence in their
midst they resented with extreme frankness. There is a continual
atmosphere of table-turning, mesmerism and magnetic flames in the tales
extant about him, and though the narrators are tender about his memory,
they have perforce to take up the attitude of counsel for the defence.
As a chemist, he undoubtedly came first in Scotland. He invented
processes for the more perfect preparation of hydrochloric acid, muriate
of morphia and oxyde of silver, besides making important observations on
many other chemicals. He had an accurate command of practical chemistry,
a power of condensation and clear expression, and a just perception of
the value of discoveries, which made his writings unsurpassed for the
use of students.
In 1844 Dr William Gregory realised the dream of his youth. After a
sharp contest with Dr Lyon Playfair, he was appointed to succeed
Professor Hope in his chair in the University of Edinburgh. ‘The chair
was given to him,’ says Sir Alexander Grant, ‘under a new title, for the
Town Council now judiciously omitted “Medicine” from its province, and
elected Dr Gregory to be Professor of Chemistry.’
His health was much impaired, so much so, that people even went the
length of saying that he was physically unfit for his new position, and
it is at any rate true that his finest teaching was given to his
students in Aberdeen. He was an able teacher, if at times erratic and
absent-minded. His class was always kept wide awake, for with what
alarms would not the professor bring back the straying imaginations of
his audience! ‘Gentlemen,’ he would say, while with his long awkward
fingers he lifted up the tube of some chemical before them, ‘If this
were to fall, not one of you could reach the door alive;’ and then,
considering the matter over, he would place the tube carelessly upon the
edge of a plate, while the students near the doorway filtered through
it, and the others, hat in hand, awaited the longed-for close of the
lecture, feeling a fresh tremor with every approach of Gregory’s loose
fingers to the fatal vial.
Good as his teaching was, the books which he wrote while in Edinburgh
were his most valuable contribution to the Science of Chemistry. In the
preface to the _Outlines of Chemistry_, which was published in 1845, he
sketched the divisions which he intended to make in his subject for the
fuller elucidation of the facts, and, had his health permitted him to
carry out his plan, ‘the instruction from his class would probably have
been more complete than from any other scientific chair in Europe.’ At
the request of Liebig, he translated several of his more important books
into English, and in the preface to the _Familiar Letters on Chemistry_,
Liebig writes, ‘From his intimate familiarity with chemical science, and
especially with the physiological subjects here treated, I am confident
that the task could not have been entrusted to better hands than those
of my friend Dr Gregory.’ Their friendship lasted throughout life, and
only a few days before Professor Gregory’s death, he was propped up in
his bed to write a pamphlet supporting some new theories of Liebig,
which the German had just communicated to him.
Gregory’s appearance was most noticeable. He was of great proportions,
obese, slouching and loosely hung together. In later years his body was
a great burden to him, but the mind kept the mastery.
He was, like his father, a keen student of language, and would wile away
many of the weary hours of forced inaction by the study of foreign
tongues. French and German were to him as familiar as English. With a
microscope, too, he did beautiful work, and was in his day, the greatest
authority on the Diatomaceae. The slides which he made of these
microscopic water-plants with their sculptured valves, were another
resource of his declining years. He presented valuable memoirs on this
subject to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he was a member.
Professor William Gregory died in Edinburgh in April 1858, and was
honoured with a public funeral.
He was succeeded in the university by Dr Lyon Playfair (afterwards Lord
Playfair) who had contested the chair unsuccessfully at the time of
Gregory’s appointment.
William Gregory was survived by an only son, who was called after his
father’s far-famed friend, James Liebig Gregory.
Duncan Farquharson Gregory was considerably younger than his brother the
Professor of Chemistry, and was not at all like him in personal
appearance. His face was a beautiful one, fine, pale, bearing on it
already in this life some of the light and joyousness that often mark
out for especial love those who are to pass quickly from this earth. His
hair, which was thick and curling, fell more about his brow than is
usual, and his eyes like dark lamps illuminated his features.
When he was hardly more than a baby, his father used fondly to predict
distinction for him. ‘He had pleasure in conversing with him as with an
equal on subjects of History and Geography,’ so Mr Ellis wrote, and this
when the boy was not more than six, for his father died before he had
left the nursery. He was a great inventor of games for himself, and made
an orrery with his busy little hands, on which he would send the planets
spinning round in their orbits.
Till he was nine years old he was taught entirely by his mother, who was
quite as attractive to her children as she had ever been in society, and
for whom Duncan had always a peculiar reverence and affection. He passed
out of her hands into the care of a tutor, and then was sent to the
Edinburgh Academy. From school he went abroad to Geneva, where his
mother and sisters were spending a winter, and on his return he attended
classes at the University of Edinburgh. In mathematics he made
astonishing strides, under Professor Wallace, and those who saw the
master and pupil together in Cambridge in after days, said that the old
man’s pride in his pupil’s success never diminished.
In 1833 Mr Gregory’s name was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and
shortly afterwards he went to reside there. He took with him a most
unusual amount of knowledge on almost all scientific subjects, in fact
many men said that it was the diffuseness of his learning that prevented
him from taking the first place in the mathematical honours in that
university; for when the tripos came he was only fifth wrangler.
A few months after his arrival in Cambridge he agreed to act as
assistant to the Professor of Chemistry, and he was one of the founders
of the Chemical Society, and occasionally gave very charming lectures in
their rooms. His other pursuits were botany, natural philosophy, and
astronomy, but his most serious study was of course mathematics.
After taking his degree of B.A. in 1837, he felt himself more at liberty
to follow original speculation, and turned his attention to the general
theory of the combination of symbols. His studies in this subject
appeared from time to time in the _Cambridge Mathematical Journal_, of
which Duncan Farquharson Gregory was editor, with only an interval of a
few months, from its first appearance till shortly before his death.
Mr Gregory was in 1840 elected a Fellow of Trinity College, and he took
his M.A. degree in the following year. In that year, too, he was
appointed to fill the office of moderator in the Mathematical Tripos.
This position, which is regarded as one of the most honourable of those
to which the younger members of the university may aspire, was filled by
him with great success.
His most considerable book (though possibly less well known than his
lucid work on solid geometry), appeared about this time. It is entitled
_Collection of Examples of the Processes of the Differential and
Integral Calculus_, and was thoughtful and original. At first his plan
had been to edit a second edition of a work with a similar title, which
twenty-five years before had come from the pens of Herschel, Peacocke,
and Babbage, but as he considered this, he discovered what immense
strides had been made in the general aspect of mathematics. The
mathematical theories of heat, light, electricity, and magnetism were
all new, and they required a fresh treatment. Thus he undertook the book
which brought him so much honour.
Gregory had an absolute passion for mathematics. ‘All these things seem
to me,’ he said once, while turning over the pages of Fourier’s great
work on heat, ‘to be a kind of mathematical paradise,’ and the enjoyment
comes out all through his book.
He contested unsuccessfully with Professor Kelland the Chair of
Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1841 was offered the
corresponding chair in Toronto, which, however, he declined; and it was
well that he did so, for in the following year he had the first attack
of the illness which was to end fatally for him. In the spring he left
Cambridge never to return again.
Up to the last he had taken part in his college work, and in spite of
severe suffering had gone through the irksome labour of examinations.
Months of all but constant pain followed, brightened only by short
intervals of ease. Whenever these occurred he turned to his old studies
for refreshment, and only a little while before his death he began a
paper on the analogy between differential equations and those in finite
differences.
As the weeks passed, the watchful eyes of his sister could see the
gradual failing of his strength, and at five o’clock on the morning of
February 23rd, 1844, he passed away in his sleep. He died at Canaan
Lodge.
His sister, Miss Georgina Gregory, made a collection of the poems
written by her brothers. Some of Mr Duncan Gregory’s verses would have
made delightful children’s poetry. One time when they had gone to the
English lakes together for change of air, they, as is not an entirely
unknown experience in that part of the world, had to spend most of their
time in the inn, and as a last resource fell to writing doggerel.
‘The fields are one extensive bog,
The roads are just as bad;
I wish I were a little frog,
Then rain would make me glad.
But I am of the human race,
Which ever since the flood
Prefers a firm, dry resting-place
To wading in the mud.
But yet at last a little gleam
Of sunshine did appear,
And did most treacherously seem
As if the sky would clear.
And trusting to its specious face
To walk Georgina tried,
But soon returned in piteous case
To have her garments dried.’
He was a delightful brother and a delightful friend. What he might have
done as a mathematician had he but lived it is impossible to tell. As it
is, a writer who has discussed the hereditary qualities of the family,
speaks of the mathematical genius, which had lain dormant since the time
of James Gregorie as ‘blazing forth’ again in Duncan Farquharson
Gregory, and if this writer passes over such talents as those of David
Gregory, the Savilian Professor at Oxford, he must have held the Fellow
of Trinity in great honour. Another authority on the family, said that
if Duncan Gregory were alive, which he might quite well be as far as
dates are concerned, he would probably have been the most famous pure
mathematician of the day. And a still greater testimony is that of Lord
Kelvin, given at the Bristol meeting of the British Association in 1898,
where in a paper on ‘Graphic Representations of the two Simplest Cases
of a Single Wave,’ he referred to Gregory’s work on this subject.
‘Gregory,’ he said, ‘died too soon,’ and as he turned from the
black-board on which he had been drawing some diagrams, he added, ‘we
cannot tell what we might have known if Gregory had lived.’ His talent
was appreciated when he lived, but the qualities to which his friends
reverted with most tenderness were his unenvious appreciation of other
men’s work, his sweetness and joyfulness, and the patience with which he
bore his last long illness.