Smith entered Glasgow College in 1737, no doubt in October, when the session began, and he remained there till the spring of 1740.  The arts curriculum at that time extended over five sessions, so that Smith did not complete the course required for a degree.  In the three sessions he attended he would go through the classes of Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and Moral Philosophy, and have thus listened to the lectures of the three eminent teachers who were then drawing students to this little western College from the most distant quarters, and keeping its courts alive with a remarkable intellectual activity.  Dr. A. Carlyle, who came to Glasgow College for his divinity classes after he had finished his arts course at Edinburgh, says he found a spirit of inquiry and a zeal for learning abroad among the students of Glasgow which he remembered nothing like among the students of Edinburgh.  This intellectual awakening was the result mainly of the teaching of three professors—­Alexander Dunlop, Professor of Greek, a man of fine scholarship and taste, and an unusually engaging method of instruction; Robert Simson, the professor of Mathematics, an original if eccentric genius, who enjoyed a European reputation as the restorer of the geometry of the ancients; and above all, Francis Hutcheson, a thinker of great original power, and an unrivalled academic lecturer.

Smith would doubtless improve his Greek to some extent under Dunlop, though from all we know of the work of that class, he could not be carried very far there.  Dunlop spent most of his first year teaching the elements of Greek grammar with Verney’s Grammar as his textbook, and reading a little of one or two easy authors as the session advanced.  Most of the students entered his class so absolutely ignorant of Greek that he was obliged to read a Latin classic with them for the first three months till they learnt enough of the Greek grammar to read a Greek one.  In the second session they were able to accompany him through some of the principal Greek classics, but the time was obviously too short for great things.  Smith, however, appears at this time to have shown a marked predilection for mathematics.  Dugald Stewart’s father, Professor Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, was a class-fellow of Smith’s at Glasgow; and Dugald Stewart has heard his father reminding Smith of a “geometrical problem of considerable difficulty by which he was occupied at the time when their acquaintance commenced, and which had been proposed to him as an exercise by the celebrated Dr. Simson.”  The only other fellow-student of his at Glasgow of whom we have any knowledge is Dr. Maclaine, the translator of Mosheim, and author of several theological works; and Dr. Maclaine informed Dugald Stewart, in private conversation, of Smith’s fondness for mathematics in those early days.  For his mathematical professor, Robert Simson himself, Smith always retained the profoundest veneration, and one of the last things he ever wrote—­a