 One colleague of Blair and Ferguson at Edinburgh University was Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), who was a student first at Edinburgh, and then at Glasgow where his moral philosophy professor was Thomas Reid. Stewart succeeded his father in the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh, and then in 1785 became professor of pneumatic and moral philosophy at Edinburgh when Ferguson resigned the chair. Stewart shared with Ferguson an interest in the kind of historical inquiry that explored how societies operate. In his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith LL.D. Dugald Stewart says of one of Smith’s works, the Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (Smith [LRB], pp. 201–26), that “it deserves our attention less, on account of the opinions it contains, than as a specimen of a particular sort of inquiry, which, so far as I know, is entirely of modern origin” (Smith 1795, p. 292). Stewart then spells out the ‘particular sort of inquiry’ that he has in mind. He notes the lack of direct evidence for the origin of language, of the arts and the sciences, of political union, and so on, and affirms: “In this want of direct evidence, we are under a necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are likely to have proceeded, from the principles of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation” (Smith 1795, p. 293).