Glasgow is, moreover, an ancient seat of learning, and a great centre of commerce. For five hundred years its University has shed light over Scotland, and other countries as well. As for primary education, the official report says, "it is a rare thing now to find a child in the city, over ten or eleven years of age, who cannot read and write. Its art galleries, museums, music, lectures, its magnificent municipal buildings erected at a cost of two million six hundred thousand dollars, its sanitary arrangements, under the influence of which the rate of mortality is steadily decreasing, its water system, which, at a cost of seventeen million five hundred dollars, has brought an abundant supply of pure water from Loch Katrine through thirty-five miles of mountainous country--all are worthy of the second city of the kingdom. And, as everybody knows, Glasgow is the place where "the stately ocean greyhounds" are built. Fifty-five million dollars have been expended in "turning what was once a little salmon stream into one of the greatest navigable highways of the world." In 1768, the Clyde, at low water, was one foot deep, where now it is twenty-four feet. What is it that has given this venerable Presbyterian city this proud position, next to London? "Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word."
It is said that the word "Glasgow" comes from "Glescu," gray mist. It deserved its name when we arrived there on the 30th of August, 1902, and it continued to deserve it throughout our stay. The fog was so heavy and dense that one felt almost as if it could be sawn into slabs.
I can testify further that the city deserved its name also on the 17th of June, 1896, when the delegates to the Sixth General Council of the Reformed Churches Throughout the World Holding the Presbyterian System, gathered in the Barony Church, and marched through a cold rain, across the wide paved square, to the ancient cathedral, where the opening sermon was to be preached. This majestic building, now more than seven hundred years old, is thus described by Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth chapter of _Rob Roy_, "The pile is of a gloomy and massive, rather than of an elegant, style of Gothic architecture; but its peculiar character is so strongly preserved, and so well suited with the accompaniments which surround it, that the impression of the first view was solemn and awful in the extreme." As Andrew Fairservice said to the hero of that stirring story, whom Scott represents as addressed by Rob Roy from behind one of the pillars in the crypt, "It's a brave kirk--nane o' yer whigmalieries and curliewurlies and opensteek hems about it--a solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as long as the world, keep hands and gunpowder aff it." And, indeed, it looks as if it would. On the crest of the hill, in the adjacent necropolis, stands a splendid Doric column surmounted by a statue of John Knox.