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...of the subject. Not only did he make many mistakes indeed howlers, in his lectures, but he was also incompetent in the dissecting room, where his attendance was much less frequent than it was supposed to be. Sometimes his lecture, which ought to have lasted an hour, was over in thirty minutes and on occasion it was read verbatim from printed books to which the students had access. When questions were put to him he had often to consult a manual in order to obtain the answer. The upshot was that his dissatisfied students presented a petition to the authorities demanding his removal and when this was not forthcoming they resorted to disruptive tactics in the lecture room; stamping their feet, singing, kicking the boards in front of their benches and even shooting swan shot at the lecturer. Professor Dewar's laboratory boy picked up several pipes and a lot of shot from the floor of Branford's lecture room. As Secretary of the college young Professor Dewar was drawn into the dispute. Student insubordination, like all hooliganism, is never completely self-contained. There is an overspill which affects the innocent. Of the students who attended his lectures Professor Dewar said that until after Christmas, when their opposition to Branford became vehement, "they behaved extremely well and paid attention to the lectures, so much so, that I said to them" - with a touch of humour, one imagines - "that I was agreeably disappointed at their conduct." After Christmas he did have one spot of bother. It was his custom, as he had agreed with the students, to appear on the lecture platform seven minutes after the appointed hour, when he expected them all to be in the room and seated. During the weeks of unsettlement in the college when he passed in through the gateway he often found them standing at the entrance, "listening to a hurdy gurdy or organ grinder or a bagpipe player", which he told them was quite ungentlemanly conduct. One day some students were very late having been engaged, as one of them confessed, "in kicking an old hat about in Clyde Street'. When the latecomers reached the classroom door they found that the professor had locked it and had commenced his lecture. The outsiders had indulged in noise and shouting hoping thereby, but unsuccessfully as it turned out, to cause the lecturer to cease. Next day when Professor Dewar arrived he found that he was locked; so he went back to the laboratory and resumed his work there. On the next day, when things had returned to normal, he reprimanded them sternly for their misconduct and one student had the decency to apologise which "I regarded as a gentlemanly thing to do". Young though he was, James Dewar was a firm disciplinarian who regarded it as his duty to rebuke in the plainest terms any misbehaviour inside or outside the college. "When I heard them swearing in St Andrew's Square as I passed along or saw them drunk standing in the college yard I interfered, as I felt I was morally bound to do as a professor." He was quite sure, and experience proved him right, that firm dealing with miscreants earned the proper response and that to treat serious misbehaviour as a joke was only to invite worse misconduct. Possessing a thorough mastery of his subject James Dewar was an effective teacher. One of his pupils, an elderly gentleman still alive in 1923, remembered his late teacher "as brimful of energy and enthusiasm which he communicated to his class". As Principal Williams said, "Professor Dewar is a first rate chemist and when he tones down, with a little more experience, he will be a first rate teacher." But it was to research that he was devoted heart and soul, working in the chemical laboratory until usually one or two o'clock in the morning.
In his autobiography John Gray McKenrick, later to become Professor of Physiology in Glasgow University, tells how, when he was one day in the office of the Principal of the Veterinary College, a young man entered and "introducing himself he said, 'you and I should know each other Dr McKenrick'. The young man was James Dewar whose scientific contributions to The Royal Society of Edinburgh I had read. That introduction not only influenced my future career but produced a warm personal friendship that will last till the end of our lives." A few days later they met again in the quadrangle of the university and Dewar suggested that together they should begin researches on the effect of light on the eye. This led not only to an academically fruitful partnership between the chemist and the physiologist but to the important discovery that when light falls on the living retina an electrical current is produced which can be recognised with a sensitive galvanometer. Dr McKenrick provides an interesting account of the weeks and months of eager experimentation which resulted in their joint authorship of four papers read in 1874 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. "I shall never forget" he writes "the evening when, in a little room upstairs above the... NEXT PAGE
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