JAMES WILSON

first to demonstrate the now accepted theory concerning them, an account of which ap peared in "The Philosophical Transac tions" of the Royal Society of London in 1774. He was also an author of a number of philosophical and scientific pamphlets, and died at Edinburgh on October 18, 1786. His second son was named James Wilson. In November, 1757, our James Wilson, then fifteen years of age, matriculated at the ancient University of St. Andrews, even then hoary with more than three centuries of learning. He there, in competition with nine other applicants, gained one of the four vacant bursaries; but he soon after entered the University of Glasgow, and from thence went to the University of Edinburgh, where he came in contact with four of the greatest minds in Scotland. Here he was thrown in close association with James Watt, of steam engine fame, who in 1762 had made his historic experi ments with the Newcomen engine, and there also in 1763 he was under the celebrated Dr. Hugh Blair, the Regius Professor of rhetoric, and in 1765 he took the course in logic under Professor John Stevenson, as well as one in moral philosophy under the no less distinguished Professor Adam Fer guson, — " Fighting Ferguson," who in 1745 was chaplain of the famous " Black Watch" regiment. Dr. Ferguson was himself a St. Andrews man of profound learning and of great mental and physical vigor; Sir William Hamilton described his ethical teaching as an inculcation "in a great measure of the need of the warrior spirit in the moral life." In 176 1 he published a pamphlet on the importance of a Scotch militia, and in 1762 organized a club, since historic, to aid in the establishment of the militia. Such in part was the environment and equipment Scot land furnished the intellectual giant she sent forth to battle for religious and civil liberty in the New World. The dominant characteristics of Wilson's life indicate that while in Scotland he must have become at least a residuary legatee of

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the teachings of St. Andrews' great politi cal scientist, George Buchanan, who, even two hundred years before Wilson's day, as pointed out by Andrew Carnegie, the present Lord Rector of St. Andrews, proclaimed in Britain in his " De Jure Regni," that all power resided in the people, and that kings were only to be upheld so long as they wrought the people's good, — a book which was suppressed by Parliament in 1584, but which became a standard authority in the hands of the men of the Long Parliament, and contained doctrines afterwards adopted by John Milton Wilson's great power in America resulted in part from his superb educational equip ment,—without it he could never have wielded the dominant influence he did in the great Constitutional convention of 1787. A manuscript letter from one of his teachers shows in one sentence that he was not only Scotch to the core, but that he had a due regard for physical exercise, for it contains a reference to the interesting fact that, when professor and pupil last golfed to gether, Wilson was able to best his older countryman "on every round" of the links at St. Andrews. Wilson's career may not answer the Carnegie inquiry as to "Why are the Scotch so very Scotch?" but it evi dences the tremendous pertinacious power of Scotch blood, which since Wilson's day has ever played an important part in the making of America. Wilson emigrated to America in 1765, but though thoroughly American in spirit he ever kept green the memory of his Scotch antecedents, and early joined the Saint Andrew's Society of Philadelphia, serving as its president from 1786 to 1796. Landing in New York, he for a time re mained there; but, deeply impressed by the proceedings of the Stamp Act Congress, and the important part played therein by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, the author of the celebrated Farmer's Letters, he jour neyed to Philadelphia, arriving in 1766, and soon became a teacher in the College of