It was intended that I should go to college, and my father could have put me through without serious inconvenience; but he was buying land about this time, and he persuaded me to give up that idea and to go at once at the study of medicine, which I did, in the autumn of 1826, beginning with the session of 1826-27 in the medical college (of the western district), then a flourishing country medical school at Fairfield. I had already attended its courses in chemistry, given by Professor James Hadley (father of Professor James Hadley of Yale College, then a lad), my earliest scientific adviser and most excellent friend. I had a passion for mineralogy in those days, as well as for chemistry. The spring and summer of 1827 I passed in the office of one of the village doctors of Sauquoit, Dr. Priest, and on the opening of the autumn session returned to the medical school at Fairfield. That year, in the course of the winter, I picked up and read the article “Botany” in Brewster’s “Edinburgh Encyclopædia,” a poor thing, no doubt, but it interested me much. I bought Eaton’s “Manual of Botany,”[15] pored over its pages, and waited for spring. Before the spring opened, the short college session being over, I became a medical student, after the country fashion, in the office of Dr. John F. Trowbridge of Bridgewater, Oneida County, nine miles south of my paternal home; continued there for three years, except during the college sessions, where I attended four annual courses before taking my degree of M. D. at the close of the session of 1829-30.[16] The fact will appear, which I did not reveal at the time, that I took this degree six or seven months (I passed my examination, indeed, eight or nine months) before I had attained the legal age of twenty-one. But I looked older, and was in fact such an old stager in the school that no one thought of asking if I was of age. That degree gives me my place high enough on the Harvard University list to entitle me to a free dinner at Commencement.