lasgow, that he had more
students than Smith ever had, and had already touched L70 of fees, but
expected, when all the students arrived, to make L100 that
session.[35] The income from fees in the Scotch chairs in last century
seems to have been subject to considerable variations from session to
session. A bad harvest would sometimes tell seriously on the
attendance, and a great crisis like that of 1772, when the effects of
a succession of bad harvests were aggravated by ruinous mercantile
speculations, deprived Adam Ferguson in the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy
chair of half his usual income from fees. It may also be mentioned as
a curious circumstance that in those days a professor used to lose
regularly many pounds a year by light money. When Lord Brougham, as a
young student of chemistry in Edinburgh, paid his fee to Black, the
great chemist weighed the guineas carefully on a weighing machine he
had on the table before him, and observed in explanation, "I am
obliged to weigh when strange students come, there being a very large
number who bring light guineas, so that I should be defrauded of many
pounds every year if I did not act in self-defence against this class
of students."[36]

Smith kept an occasional boarder in his house, and would of course
make a trifle by that, but his regular income from his class work
would not exceed L170 a year. L170 a year, however, was a very
respectable income at a period when, as was the case in 1750, only
twenty-nine ministers in all broad Scotland had as much as L100 a
year, and the highest stipend in the Church was only L138.[37]

Besides his salary Smith had a house in the College--one of those new
manses in the Professors' Court which Glasgow people at the time
considered very grand; and though the circumstance is trifling, it is
a little curious that he changed his house three times in the course
of his thirteen years' professorship. It was the custom when a house
fell vacant for the professors to get their choice of it in the order
of their academical seniority. There seems to have been no compulsion
about the step, so that it is not beneath noticing that Smith should
in so short a term have elected to make the three removes which
proverbial wisdom deprecates. When his friend Cullen was translated
to Edinburgh in 1756, Smith, who was next in seniority, having been
made professor in Glasgow a few months after the eminent physician,
removed to Cullen's house; then he quitted thi