Abstract
THE year 1754 gave promise of being an important one in the annals of Scotland, for it saw steps taken to found the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture. Within a decade, however, the Society had metamorphosed into a Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English in Scotland, which led to a fate justly deserved. But according to Prof. John Read, in the second edition of his pamphlet "Historic St. Andrews and its University" (W. C. Henderson and Sons, Ltd., St. Andrews, 1945), 1754 also saw a more enduring and certainly much more influential society formed by twenty-two "Noblemen and Gentlemen, being admirers of the ancient and healthful exercise of the Golf", namely, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club—legislative authority of the game. By that time, however, the University of St. Andrews, junior only to Oxford and Cambridge in Great Britain, was more than three centuries old, with a tradition and setting that make St. Andrews "at once the Canterbury and the Oxford (or Cambridge) of Scotland".
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Historic St. Andrews and its University. Nature 155, 601–602 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155601d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155601d0