chicken-broth was accompanied with a tankard of sound claret, and then the cloth was removed for whist and a bowl of punch.  At whist Smith was not considered an eligible partner, for, says Ramsay of Ochtertyre, if an idea struck him in the middle of the game he “either renounced or neglected to call,"[73] and he must have in this way given much provocation to the amiability of Simson, who, though as absent-minded as Smith ever was at common seasons, was always keenly on the alert at cards, and could never quite forgive a slip of his partner in the game.  After cards the rest of the evening was spent in cheerful talk or song, in which again Simson was ever the leading spirit.  He used to sing Greek odes set to modern airs, which the members never tired of hearing again, for he had a fine voice and threw his soul into the rendering.  Professor Robison of Edinburgh, who was one of his students, twice heard him—­no doubt at this club, for Simson never went anywhere else—­sing a Latin hymn to the Divine Geometer, apparently of his own making, and the tears stood in the worthy old gentleman’s eyes with the emotion he put into the singing of it.  His conversation is said to have been remarkably animated and various, for he knew most other subjects nearly as well as he did mathematics.  He was always full of hard problems suggested by his studies of them, and he threw into the discussion much whimsical humour and many well-told anecdotes.  The only subject debarred was religion.  Professor Traill says any attempt to introduce that peace-breaking subject in the club was checked with gravity and decision.  Simson was invariably chairman, and so much of the life of the club came from his presence that when he died in 1768 the club died too.

Three at least of the younger men who shared the simple pleasures of this homely Anderston board—­Adam Smith, Joseph Black, and James Watt—­were to exert as important effects on the progress of mankind as any men of their generation.  Watt specially mentions Smith as one of the principal figures of the club, and says their conversation, “besides the usual subjects with young men, turned principally on literary topics, religion, morality, belles-lettres, etc., and to this conversation my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended a college, and being then but a mechanic."[74] According to this account religion was not proscribed, but Professor Traill’s assertion is so explicit that probably Watt’s recollection errs.  It is, however, another sign of the liberal spirit that then animated these Glasgow professors to find them welcoming on a footing of perfect equality one who, as he says, was then only a mechanic, but whose mental worth they had the sense to recognise.  Dr. Carlyle, who was invited by Simson to join the club in 1743, says the two chief spirits in it then were Hercules Lindsay, the Professor of Law, and James Moor, the Professor