FERGUSON, ADAM, born in 1724, was the son of a parish minister in Perthshire. He studied at St. Andrews and at Edinburgh, with a view to the Christian ministry. On being ordained, he was appointed chaplain to the 42nd, a Highland regiment, in which he remained till 1757, when he retired, and was appointed keeper of the advocates' library of Edinburgh. In 1759 he was made professor of natural philosophy in the college of that city, and in 1761 he was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy, a branch of science to which he had more particularly applied himself. In 1767 he published his 'Essay on the History of Civil Society,' a work which was well received, and which procured him the notice of public men. It was reprinted several times, and translated into the French, German, and Swedish languages. In 1774 he accompanied the young Earl of Chesterfield on his travels, but remained with him only a twelvemonth. In 1776 he wrote 'Remarks on a Pamphlet of Dr. Price, entitled Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty.' In 1778 he was appointed secretary to the commissioners who were sent to America in order to try to effect a reconciliation with the mother country, an office in which Ferguson took a clearer view of the state of the question, and of the temper of the American people, than was common at that time with Englishmen. On his return in 1779 he resumed the duties of his pro fessorship, and in 1783 he published his History of the Progress and the Termination of the Roman Republic,' 3 vole. 4to. This work, which has been reprinted several times, and by which Ferguson is most generally known, is not so much a regular narrativo of the events of Roman history, as a commentary on that history ; its object is to elucidate the progress and changes of the internal policy of the Roman commonwealth, the successive conditions of its social state, as well as the progress of the military system of the Romans, and the varied but studied course of their external policy towards foreign nations. He carries his work down to the end of the reign of Tibe
rius, when all remains of the old institutions may be said to have become effaced. Ferguson's work forms therefore a kind of introduc tion to that of Gibbon on the decline and fall of the empire. Ferguson and his contemporary, the French Abb6 Auger, were foremost among thoso who, previous to Niebuhr, investigated the internal working of the institutions of the Roman republic. [AUGER]. In 1784 Ferguson re signed his professorship on account of ill health, and was succeeded by Dugald Stewart. In1792 he published' Principles of Moral and Politi cal Science,' being chiefly a retrospect of lectures on ethics and politics, delivered in the College of Edinburgh,' 2 vols. 4to. Another work of Dr. Ferguson on the same subject, though a more elementary one, the 'Institutes of Moral Philosophy,' which he first published in 1769, has been translated into the French.and German languages, and often reprinted. Ferguson died at St. Andrews in February 1816, being above ninety years of age. Ho had been on terms of friendship with Hume, Robertson, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Playfair, and other distinguished contemporaries.