The original College buildings were opened for the reception and instruction of students on September 6th, 1843. Only twenty regular students were in attendance during the first session, seventeen of whom took the Classical course and three the Mathematical course. Steps were at once taken to provide an adequate collegiate education as called for in the founder's will, and to organise the teaching and administration on as extensive and sound a basis as the available funds would permit. A few books and some scanty school equipment were received from the Normal School recently closed. The fees of students were fixed at £5 a year, of which £1 13s. 4d. was assigned to the Senior Professor as his portion, 6s. 8d. to the Bursar, and the remaining £3 to the "House Fund." In addition, each student paid to the Registrar who was also Secretary and Bursar, a matriculation fee of 10 shillings which that official was allowed to keep for his own use. The fees were reduced a few months later to £3, of which the House Fund received £2 13s. 4d., and the Bursar 6s. 8d. Students under fourteen years of age and over eighteen were not allowed to matriculate into the ordinary classes except in very exceptional cases. The matriculation examination was at first mainly in Latin and Greek Grammar and the 1st Book of Cæsar's Commentaries. Students who failed to pass this examination were allowed to enter the College and were formed into a separate class. They paid an additional entrance fee of 10 shillings and an annual fee of £2, for which they were not to expect the attention given to other students. Students over eighteen were permitted to enter as "Fellow Commoners," and were allowed the special privilege of dining at "the high table." They paid a double matriculation fee, and their ordinary fee was twenty-five per cent higher than that of other students. For a brief time only there was a common dining-room, but because of financial storm and stress and the necessity for additional room this was in the end abandoned and the students boarded with the professors who had rooms in the College. Indeed, the willingness to accept students as boarders seems, in some cases at least, to have been a condition of appointment, and little choice in the matter was left to the professor. It was decided that all examinations for degrees should be held "within the walls of the College in the presence of all the officers of the University and College," and that every candidate for a medical degree "must forward his inaugural dissertation to the Principal before the last day of March."