grounds. They had just before endowed a new chair of astronomy, of
which they had made their versatile type-founder the first professor,
and built for him an astronomical observatory, from which he brought
reputation to the College and himself by his observation of the solar
spots. They further gave Foulis in 1753 several more rooms in the
College, including the large room afterwards used as the Faculty Hall,
to carry out his ill-fated scheme of an Academy of Design; so that the
arts of painting, sculpture, and engraving were taught in the College
as well as the classics and mathematics, and Tassie and David Allan
were then receiving their training under the same roof with the
students for the so-called learned professions. The Earl of Buchan,
while walking, as he said, "after the manner of the ancients in the
porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar," unbent from the high
tasks of philosophy by learning to etch in the studio of Foulis. This
was the first school of design in Great Britain. There was as yet no
Royal Academy, no National Gallery, no South Kensington Museum, no
technical colleges, and the dream of the ardent printer, which was so
actively seconded by the heads of the University, was to found an
institution which should combine the functions of all those several
institutions, and pay its own way by honest work into the bargain. In
all these different ways the College of Glasgow was doing its best, as
far as its slender means allowed, to widen the scope of university
education in accordance with the requirements of modern times, and
there was still another direction in which they anticipated a movement
of our own day. They had already done something for that
popularisation of academic instruction which we call university
extension. Professor John Anderson, an active and reforming spirit who
deserves to be held in honour in spite of his troublesome pugnacity,
used then to deliver within the College walls, with the complete
concurrence and encouragement of his colleagues, a series of evening
lectures on natural philosophy to classes of working-men in their
working clothes, and the lectures are generally acknowledged to have
done great service to the arts and manufactures of the West of
Scotland, by improving the technical education of the higher grades of
artisans.

Now in all these new developments Smith took a warm interest; some of
them he actively promoted. There is nothing in the University minutes