His settlement at Birmingham was, in one way, most fortunate. It brought him under the instruction of the excellent Priestley. He left the strict and narrow sect in which he had been brought up, and joined a congregation which its pastor, perhaps with justice, described as the most liberal of any in England. He became an orthodox Unitarian. “For about five years I had,” as he said on his death-bed, “great privileges in the pastoral services of Dr. Priestley, and especially in his lectures to the younger members of his congregation, and in occasional conversations with him. This delightful period was closed by the Birmingham riots.” The philosopher could not but have liked his thoughtful and high-minded disciple. In fact, Thomas Hill was heard to say, with not a little pride, that when he had once made some request of Priestley, he received as answer, “You know, Hill, I never can refuse you anything.” Rowland Hill said that through his father he himself owed much to Priestley as a teacher of politics and science. To him as a teacher of religion he acknowledged no obligation. From Priestley Thomas Hill got, no doubt, an increased relish for the study of Natural Philosophy. When he was a child of nine, he had been present at some of Ferguson’s lectures. Much that he had heard and seen had been beyond his understanding, but “some parts of the lecturer’s apparatus were,” as he said, with a memory that had with the flight of nearly eighty years lost none of its freshness, “delightfully comprehensible.” He gradually acquired a considerable knowledge of most of the branches of Natural Philosophy, and what he knew he knew thoroughly. On some of these subjects he lectured at the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and lectured well. He did not, however, servilely follow authority. So early as 1807, and perhaps earlier, writes his son, “he emphatically protested against the use of the term, ‘electric fluid,’ (substituting that of ‘electric influence,’) and against the Franklinian theory of positive and negative electricities.” His favourite study, next to astronomy, was the formation of our letter-sounds, and here he was under no obligation, either to Priestley, or, so far as I know, to anyone else. In a lecture that he delivered before the Institution so early as 1821, he established the distinction between vocal and whispered sounds. It is to him that Dr. Guest, the learned master of Caius College, Cambridge, refers in the following passage in his “History of English Rhythms.”[10] “The distinction here taken between vocal and whisper letters appears to me important. I once thought it was original; but in conversing on this subject with a respected friend, to whose instructions I owe much, I found his views so nearly coinciding with my own, that I have now but little doubt the hint was borrowed.”