Having received the elements of his education in the Grammar School of Colchester, his native town, Gilbert entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from which university he took his B. A. degree in 1560, M. A. in 1564 and M. D. in 1569. In all, he appears to have been connected with the University for a period of eleven or twelve years, as student, Fellow, and examiner. On leaving Cambridge, Gilbert traveled for four years on the Continent, principally in Italy, visiting medical schools and studying methods of treatment under the leading physicians and surgeons of the day as well as discussing scientific theory with the leaders of thought. On his return to England in 1573, he practised medicine in London "with great applause and success." He was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1599, and appointed Physician to Queen Elizabeth in 1601 and to her successor, James I., in 1603. On one occasion, he hears that Baptista Porta, whom he calls "a philosopher of no ordinary note," said that a piece of iron rubbed with a diamond turns to the north. He suspects this to be heresy. So, forthwith he proceeds to test the statement by experiment. He was not dazzled by the reputation of Baptista Porta; he respected Porta, but respected truth even more. He tells us that he experimented with seventy diamonds in presence of many witnesses, employing a number of iron bars and pieces of wire, manipulating them with the greatest care while they floated on corks; and concludes his long and exhaustive research by plaintively saying: "Yet never was it granted me to see the effect mentioned by Porta." Though it led to a negative result, this probing inquiry was a masterpiece of experimental work. Gilbert incidentally regrets that the men of his time "are deplorably ignorant with respect to natural things," and the only way he sees to remedy this is to make them "quit the sort of learning that comes only from books and that rests only on vain arguments and conjectures," for he shrewdly remarks that "even men of acute intelligence without actual knowledge of facts and in the absence of experiment easily fall into error." Acting on this intimate conviction, he labored for twenty years over the theories and experiments which he sets forth in his great work on the magnet. "There is naught in these books," he tells us, "that has not been investigated, and again and again done and repeated under our eyes." He begs any one that should feel disposed to challenge his results to repeat the experiments for himself "carefully, skilfully and deftly, but not heedlessly and bunglingly."