1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Geddes, Sir William Duguid

GEDDES, SIR WILLIAM DUGUID (1828–1900), Scottish scholar and educationist, was born in Aberdeenshire. He was educated at Elgin academy and university and King’s College, Aberdeen, and after having held various scholastic posts he was appointed in 1860 professor of Greek and in 1885 principal of the (united) university of Aberdeen. He was knighted in 1892. He died in Aberdeen on the 9th of February 1900. It is chiefly as a teacher that Geddes will be remembered, and in his enthusiastic and successful efforts to raise the standard of Greek at the Scottish universities he has been compared with the humanists of the Renaissance. Amongst other works he was the author of A Greek Grammar (1855; 17th edition, 1883; new and revised edition, 1893); a meritorious edition of the Phaedo of Plato (2nd ed., 1885); and The Problem of the Homeric Poems (1878), in which, while supporting Grote’s view that the Iliad consisted of an original Achilleïs with insertions or additions by later hands, he maintains that these insertions are due to the author of the Odyssey.