As the weeks passed, the watchful eyes of his sister could see the gradual failing of his strength, and at five o’clock on the morning of February 23rd, 1844, he passed away in his sleep. He died at Canaan Lodge.
His sister, Miss Georgina Gregory, made a collection of the poems written by her brothers. Some of Mr Duncan Gregory’s verses would have made delightful children’s poetry. One time when they had gone to the English lakes together for change of air, they, as is not an entirely unknown experience in that part of the world, had to spend most of their time in the inn, and as a last resource fell to writing doggerel.
‘The fields are one extensive bog, The roads are just as bad; I wish I were a little frog, Then rain would make me glad.
But I am of the human race, Which ever since the flood Prefers a firm, dry resting-place To wading in the mud.
But yet at last a little gleam Of sunshine did appear, And did most treacherously seem As if the sky would clear.
And trusting to its specious face To walk Georgina tried, But soon returned in piteous case To have her garments dried.’
He was a delightful brother and a delightful friend. What he might have done as a mathematician had he but lived it is impossible to tell. As it is, a writer who has discussed the hereditary qualities of the family, speaks of the mathematical genius, which had lain dormant since the time of James Gregorie as ‘blazing forth’ again in Duncan Farquharson Gregory, and if this writer passes over such talents as those of David Gregory, the Savilian Professor at Oxford, he must have held the Fellow of Trinity in great honour. Another authority on the family, said that if Duncan Gregory were alive, which he might quite well be as far as dates are concerned, he would probably have been the most famous pure mathematician of the day. And a still greater testimony is that of Lord Kelvin, given at the Bristol meeting of the British Association in 1898, where in a paper on ‘Graphic Representations of the two Simplest Cases of a Single Wave,’ he referred to Gregory’s work on this subject. ‘Gregory,’ he said, ‘died too soon,’ and as he turned from the black-board on which he had been drawing some diagrams, he added, ‘we cannot tell what we might have known if Gregory had lived.’ His talent was appreciated when he lived, but the qualities to which his friends reverted with most tenderness were his unenvious appreciation of other men’s work, his sweetness and joyfulness, and the patience with which he bore his last long illness.