There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.

Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men's ideas.

His _Essay on the History of Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was thought by Helvetius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression.

At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible.

He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government.