In addition to Dr. Hadley’s summer course of lectures on chemistry, Dr. Lewis C. Beck used to come and deliver a short course of lectures on botany. He gave this up the year in which I received my M. D., so Professor Hadley invited me to come and give the course instead. The course was given in five or six weeks, beginning in the latter part of May. I prepared myself during the winter, gave this my first course of lectures, cleared forty dollars by the operation, and devoted it to the making of a tour to the western part of the State of New York, as far as Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Aurora,--a dozen or more miles off,--where I visited an uncle, my mother’s brother, a well-to-do country merchant, also a chum, Dr. Folwell, in Seneca County, high up between the two lakes, where I passed a week or two; thence to Ithaca, and across the country by a stage-coach back to Bridgewater. I hardly know what I did the next autumn and winter, but in early spring a Mr. Edgerton, a pupil of Amos Eaton, at Troy, the professor of natural sciences at the flourishing school of Mr. Bartlett at Utica, died. I applied for the vacancy, received the appointment, and for two or part of three years, minus a long summer vacation, I taught chemistry, geology, mineralogy, and botany, to boys, making with the boys very pleasant botanical excursions through the country round. My first summer vacation, if I rightly remember, was in cholera year, the disease being very fatal in Utica. About the time it made its appearance in New York I started off from Bridgewater, taking a little country stage-coach down the Unadilla to Pennsylvania; visited Carbondale and made a collection of calamites and fossil ferns; thence by stage-coach through the Wind Gap to Easton; thence out to Bethlehem, where I passed a day with old Bishop Schweinitz,[18] gave him a Carex which he said was new, but I told him it was Carex livida, Wahl. (and I was right); back to Easton; thence up to Sussex County, N. J., collecting minerals (Franklinite, etc.); thence to adjacent Orange County, N. Y., collecting spinelles, etc., as well as botanizing; thence down to New York early in September; there I met Dr. Torrey for the first time, and we took a little expedition together down to Tom’s River in the pine barrens, and back to New York in a wood-sloop.