Many circumstances in these early times favored the establishment of a medical college in Lexington. Not only had that city been recognized for many years as a great center of public education for the whole State--made so by the location in it of the State's University, "Transylvania"--but it was also at that time the great metropolis of the West. The country around it, though fast becoming settled and improved by enterprising pioneers, had not as yet been provided with roads, or good means of communication with older settlements. To ascend the Ohio River and cross the Alleghany Mountains to Philadelphia, where the only other medical school then existed, was a tedious and laborious undertaking, not devoid of danger. The celebrated French botanist, F. A. Michaux, who visited this country in 1802, was obliged to walk most of the way over the mountains to Pittsburg. Descending the Ohio River in a canoe and landing at Limestone (now Maysville), he consumed two days and a half on horseback on his journey from that place to Lexington, having been obliged to leave his baggage behind. The late Professor Charles Caldwell records, in his remarkable _Autobiography_, that as late as 1820, when he set out from Lexington for Europe to purchase books and apparatus for the Medical Department of Transylvania, he was compelled to travel from Lexington to Maysville on horseback, with his baggage on a pack-horse conducted by a servant on a third horse. "The animals were all powerful and active," but "so deep and adhesive was the mud that they did not reach Maysville--only sixty miles distant--until an early hour on the fourth day," although diligence on his part was not wanting. Students of this region had to overcome very great difficulties when they set out in search of instruction in the medical schools of Philadelphia. On March 2, 1816, one thousand dollars were appropriated by the Trustees of Transylvania and placed in the hands of Doctor Blythe and John D. Clifford for the immediate purchase of chemical apparatus. Doctor Blythe, who had been acting President of the University up to this time, resigned and accepted the position of Professor of Chemistry in the Medical Department. In 1817 the Medical Faculty was further reorganized by the appointment of the late celebrated, talented Doctor Daniel Drake to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany. The organization was then as follows: Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. Doctor James Overton, Professor of Theory and Practice. Doctor Daniel Drake, Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Botany. Doctor William H. Richardson, Professor of Obstetrics, etc. Doctor James Blythe, Professor of Chemistry, etc. Doctor Drake has stated that twenty pupils attended this course of lectures, and the degree of M. D. was--for the first time in Lexington--conferred on John Lawson McCullough of this city. [Illustration: DOCTOR WILLIAM H. RICHARDSON. From a Portrait by Jouett.]