William Smellie's views were relatively extreme, yet an interest in animals was expressed by most of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. The constitutive contribution of Adam Smith will be the subject of one of the following chapters. Here we will outline a more synoptic view, although we will give particular attention to the physician John Gregory, best known for his contributions to the early development of medical ethics. Gregory, like most other Scottish contemporaries, was more conservative in his attitude toward animals, but at the same time was not completely unreceptive to the idea of moral obligations toward them, even if less so than Smellie. The views of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers were influenced by, and reflected, general contemporary European intellectual developments, although the Scots were often at the forefront of philosophical innovation. They did exhibit certain typical traits, however, notably those influenced by the thought of Rousseau, particularly the latter's primitivistic notions regarding the stages of development of human society. The Scots, however, most often subverted Rousseau's ultimate aim; instead of utilizing conjectural-history analysis of social development to criticize advanced civilization, they used it to commend it. We will take a closer look at conjectural history in the following chapters. At this stage it is enough to note that it was concerned with theoretical suppositions about human social and cultural development in the early pre-literate stages of history. The comparison of human beings with animals was an integral part of this theorizing. For our purposes, its main objective, the clarification of human nature, is less important. While animals were usually utilized mainly as similes for elucidating human issues, occasionally a consideration of them in themselves was revealed in such discussions. This was true in the case of Gregory. His version of this debate in his book A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World followed other Scottish philosophers in according animals only a limited amount of attention, especially when discussing the primitive, savage, sensual, and instinctive elements of human nature. Yet in this context he devoted more attention to the animals per se than many of his contemporaries.