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The "Notes of Dr. Smith's Rhetorick Lectures," discovered in 1958 by a University of Aberdeen professor, consists of lecture notes taken by two of Smith's students at the University of Glasgow in 1762-1763. There are thirty lectures in the collection, all on rhetoric and the different kinds or characteristics of style.
The book is divided into "an examination of the several ways of communicating our thoughts by speech" and "an attention to the principles of those literary compositions which contribute to persuasion or entertainment." The species of communication discussed include descriptive and narrative (or historical) composition, poetry, demonstrative oratory, panegyric, didactic or scientific language, deliberative oratory, and judicial or forensic oratory.
The subjects addressed in his teachings include the style and genius of some of the best of the ancient writers and poets, especially the historians and the English classics.

The English language perhaps needs our care in this respect more than any other. New words are continually pushing out our own originall ones; so that the stock of our own is now become but very small and is still diminishing. This perhaps is owing to a defect which our language labours much under, of being compounded of a great number of others. | 4 {No author has been more attentive to this point than Swift; we may say his language is more English than any other writer that we have.} Most terms of art and most compounded words are borrowed from other languages, so that the lower sort of People, and those who are not acquainted with those languages from whence they are taken h can hardly understand many of the words of their own tongue. Hence it is that we see this sort of people are continually using these words in meanings altogether foreign to their proper ones i . The Greeks used compounded words but then they were formed from words of their own language; by this means their language was so plain that the meanest person would perfectly understand the terms of art and expressions of any | 5 artist or philosopher. The word Triangle would not be understood by an Englishman who had not learned Latin, but an Italian would at the first understand their triangulo or a Dutchman their thrienuik.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is commonly regarded as the first modern economist with the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations. He wrote in a wide range of disciplines: moral philosophy, jurisprudence, rhetoric and literature, and the history of science. He was one of the leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith also studied the social forces giving rise to competition, trade, and markets. While professor of logic, and later professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, he also had the opportunity to travel to France, where he met François Quesnay and the physiocrats; he had friends in business and the government, and drew broadly on his observations of life as well as careful statistical work summarizing his findings in tabular form. He is viewed as the founder of modern economic thought, and his work inspires economists to this day. The economic phrase for which he is most famous, the “invisible hand” of economic incentives, was only one of his many contributions to the modern-day teaching of economics.