gown classes.
Smith belonged to all three bodies; he was University professor,
Faculty or College professor, and gown professor too. It is obvious
how easily this complicated and unnatural system of government might
breed incessant and irritating discussions without any grave division
of opinion on matters of serious educational policy. Practical
difficulties could scarce help arising as to the respective functions
of the University and the College, or the respective claims of the
regius professors and the Faculty professors, or the respective powers
of the Rector and the Principal; and Smith himself was one of a small
committee which presented a very lengthy report on this last subject
to the Senate of the University on the 13th of August 1762. The report
was adopted, but two of the professors dissented on the ground that it
was too favourable to the powers of the Principal.

But, wrangle as they might over petty points of constitutional right
or property administration, the heads of Glasgow College were guided
in their general policy at this period by the wisest and most
enlightened spirit of academic enlargement. Only a few years before
Smith's arrival they had recognised the new claims of science by
establishing a chemical laboratory, in which during Smith's residence
the celebrated Dr. Black was working out his discovery of latent heat.
They gave a workshop in the College to James Watt in 1756, and made
him mathematical instrument maker to the University, when the trade
corporations of Glasgow refused to allow him to open a workshop in the
city; and it was in that very workshop and at this very period that a
Newcomen's engine he repaired set his thoughts revolving till the
memorable morning in 1764 when the idea of the separate condenser
leapt to his mind as he was strolling past the washhouse on Glasgow
Green. They had at the same time in another corner of the College
opened a printing office for the better advancement of that art, and
were encouraging the University printer, the famous Robert Foulis, to
print those Homers and Horaces by which he more than rivalled the
Elzevirs and Etiennes of the past. To help Foulis the better, they had
with their own money assisted the establishment of the type-foundry of
Wilson at Camlachie, where Foulis procured the types for his _Iliad_;
they appointed Wilson type-founder to the University, and in 1762 they
erected for him a founding-house, as they called it, in their own