He read the old English dramatists, particularly Ben Jonson, Massinger, Webster, Ford and Shakspeare, and wrote out analyses of their principal characters on phrenological principles. The college text-book of mental philosophy was Browne, and Mr. Beecher's copy of Browne is marked through and through, and interlined with comparative statements of the ideas derived from his physiological investigation. With these also he carefully read and analyzed Locke, Stuart, Reid, and the other writers of the Scotch school. As a writer and debater, Mr. Beecher was acknowledged the first of the class, and was made first president of the Athenian Society, notwithstanding it had been a time-honored precedent that that distinction should belong only to the presumptive valedictorian. The classics and mathematics he had abandoned because of his interest in other things, but that abandonment settled the fact that he could never aspire to high college honors. He however, wrote for one of his papers in a college newspaper a vigorous defence of mathematical studies, which won the approbation and surprise of his teachers. It was a compliment paid by rhetoric to her silent sister. The phrenological and physiological course thus begun in college was pursued by few of the phrenological club in after life. With many it died out as a boyish enthusiasm; with one or two, as Messrs. Fowler of New York, it became a continuous source of interest and profit. With Mr. Beecher it led to a broad course of physiological study and enquiry, which, collated with metaphysics and theology, has formed his system of thought through life. From that day he has continued the reading and study of all the physiological writers in the English language. In fact, he may be said during his college life to have constructed for himself a physiological mental philosophy out of the writings of the Scotch metaphysical school and that of Combe, Spurzheim, and the other physiologists. Mr. Beecher is far from looking on phrenology as a perfected science. He regards it in relation to real truth as an artist's study towards a completed landscape; a study on right principles and in a right direction, but not as a completed work. In his view, the phrenologists, physiologists and mental philosophers of past days have all been partialists, giving a limited view of the great subject. The true mental philosophy, as he thinks, is yet to arise from a consideration of all the facts and principles evolved by all of them. Thus much is due for the understanding of Mr. Beecher's style, in which to a great extent he uses the phrenological terminology, a terminology so neat and descriptive, and definite in respect to human beings as they really exist, that it gives a great advantage to any speaker. The terms of phrenology have in fact become accepted as conveniences in treating of human nature, as much as the algebraic signs in numbers.