George Alexander Gibson was born at Greenlaw, Berwickshire, in 1858. His father was a man of rare capacity and character who wrote a history of Greenlaw and taught himself Latin so as to be able to obtain the material for his history from original documents.

After attending an elementary school at Greenlaw, Gibson enrolled in 1874 as a student at the University of Glasgow, where he gained the highest places in all the classes of the Arts curriculum. At this period of his life his health was not robust and it threatened to terminate his university studies. Consequently, in 1881, he took the degree of M.A. without honours. In the following year he was able to sit the honours examination in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and he so distinguished himself that he was awarded the Ewing Fellowship. When the degree of D.Sc. was afterwards insti tuted and the regulation required that a candidate for it should have an honours degree in Arts or Science, his ordinary degree precluded Gibson from becoming a candidate for the doctorate which his published work would doubtless have gained for him.