James Gall

James Gall (27 September 1808 – 7 February 1895) was a Scottish clergyman who founded the Carrubbers Close Mission.

[4] In 1849, aged 41, he decided to retrain as a Free Church minister and studied at New College, Edinburgh graduating in 1855.

[6] In 1858 he was chosen to minister at the new Free Church in the Canongate, holding the overspill from the growing mission work at Carrubbers Close.

This stood on Holyrood Road on the Site now occupied by the main Moray College building.

He lost his manse at John Street as a result of this decision, and lived for a while thereafter at a flat at 47 Forrest Road.

[5] Most of Gall's work on religion was detailed in a book called The Stars and the Angels, (1858) in which he not only argues for the existence of other inhabited planets, but describes the view that Gabriel would have had on his way from heaven to earth to tell Mary that she would have a baby next Christmas.

A rare, but important, work by Gall is The Synagogue Not the Temple, the Germ and Model of the Christian Church, published in 1890.

He also applied this technique to terrestrial mapmaking as a way to make a flat map of the round Earth.

Robert's son, James Gall Inglis FRSE (1865–1939) was also a keen astronomer and came to the firm in 1880.