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8.: To [ROBERT SIMSON] - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith [1740]

Edition used:

Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, vol. VI of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987).

Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


8.

To [ROBERT SIMSON]1

MS., GUA; unpubl.

Edinburgh, 10 Jan. 1751

Sir

I have just received the favor of yours.2 And must begg leave by your hands to return my sincere thanks to the gentlemen of your Society for the [favour] they have done me by electing me to supply the vacant proffesorship to declare my acceptance of their favor, and to assure them that it shall be my chief study to render myselfe a useful member of their Society.

I shall do my endeavour to get to Glasgow on Tuesday night, if something extraordinary does not prevent it. I shall, however, be under a necessity of returning in a day or in two days thereafter to Edinburgh. And cannot even be very certain if that absence will be consented to by my friends here.3 I am with great esteem dear Sir

most faithfully yours

A Smith

[1 ]This letter was meant for the Clerk of Senate, then Robert Simson (1687–1768), Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow (1711–61), the celebrated ‘restorer of ancient geometry’. Smith paid tribute to him in the 6th edition of TMS (1790): ‘The two greatest mathematicians that I ever had the honour to be known to, and, I believe, the two greatest that have ever lived in my time, Dr Robert Simson of Glasgow, and Dr Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, never seemed to feel even the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which the ignorance of the public received some of their most valuable works’ (III. ii).

[2 ]Senate directed its Clerk on 9 Jan. 1751 to write to Smith, acquainting him with his election as Professor of Logic and desiring him to be in Glasgow, ‘as soon as his affairs can allow him’ to be admitted to his chair (Scott 138). See Letter 304.

[3 ]Presumably an allusion to Smith’s commitment to give lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence in Edinburgh (1748–51) sponsored by Henry Home, Robert Craigie of Glendoick, and James Oswald of Dunnikier.