GLASGOW UNIVERSITY JUBILEE.

The celebrations in connexion with the ninth jubilee of Glasgow "University were continued yesterday. In the morning there was a crowded attendance in the Bute Hall ok the University to hear an oration on James Watt by Lord Kelvin, and another by Professor Smart on Adam Smith, and to see the graduation ceremony at the conclusion of the addresses. The front area was allotted to representatives of other Universities, the robes of the delegates from foreign countries lending a brilliant and effective note of colour to the scene.

Lord Kelvin, in his oration, said :—

Tho name of James Watt was famous throughout the whole world, in every part of which bis great work had conferred benefits on mankind in continually increasing volume up to the present day. It was fitting that the University of Glasgow, in tins celebration of its ninth jubilee, should recollect with pride the privilege it happUy exercised 145 years ago of lending a helping hand and giving a workshop within its walls to a young man of no University education, struggling to begin earning a livelihood as a mathematical instrument maker, in whom was then discovered something of the genius destined for such great things in the future. In a note by Watt appended to Professor Bobison’s dissertation on steam engines, he said that his attention was first directed in the year 1759 to tbe subject of steam engines by the late Dr. Robison, then a student in the University of Glasgow and nearly of bis own age. He at that time threw out an idea of applying the power of the steam engine to the moving of wheel carriages and to other purposes, but the scheme was not matured, and was soon abandoned. On

his going abroad about the year 1761 or 1762 Watt tried some experiments on the force of steam in a Papin’s digester, and formed a species of steam engine by fixing upon it a syringe one-third of an inch diameter with a solid piston, and furnished also with a cock to admit the steam from tho digester or shut if off ut pleasure, as well as to open a communication from the inside of the syringe to the open air, by which the steam contained in the syringe might escape. That single acting, highpressure syringe engine, made and experimented on by James Watt 140 years ago in his Glasgow College workshop, now in 1801, with the addition of a surface condenser cooled by air to receive the waste steam and a pump to return the water thence to the boiler, constituted the common road motor, which, in the opinion of many good judges, was tho most successful of all the different forms tried within the last few years. Watt left Glasgow in 1774 to live in tho neighbourhood of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, "randfather of Charles Darwin. But Greenock and the University and City of Glasgow never lost James Watt. The...