On leaving college I studied—not very profoundly—medicine, and took my degree, less with a view to professional practice, in which I never engaged, than with a view to general science. After taking my degree as Doctor of Medicine, I resumed and extended my college studies, entered largely into the study of natural history, physical geography, zoölogy, geology, mineralogy, and indeed all the ’ologies, then so fashionable that one must have a smattering of them if he would woo successfully his sweetheart. I paid some attention to Gall and Spurzheim’s new science of Phrenology, when Spurzheim visited this country, where he died, and was much interested in it till I had the misfortune to listen to a course of lectures in its exposition and defence, by George Combe, Esq., the great Scottish phrenologist. That course upset me, and I have since abandoned Phrenology, save so far as I find it taught by Plato in his Timæus, and only laughed at its pretensions and its adherents. I was arrested, for a moment, by Boston Transcendentalism, but I could not make much of it. Its chiefs told me that I was not spiritual enough to appreciate it, and that I was too much under the despotism of the understanding to be able to rise to those empyrean regions where the soul asserts her freedom, and sports with infinite delight in all the luxury of the unintelligible. I thought they talked metaphysics, what neither their hearers nor themselves could understand; and finding myself very little enlightened by their intelligible unintelligibility, their dark utterances, and their Orphic sayings, I gave them up, and returned to my laboratory. About 1836, I made the acquaintance of Dr. P——, or, as he claimed to be, the Marquis de P——, a native of one of the French West India Islands, but brought up and educated at Paris, where he had been a Saint-Simonian, and a chief of the _savans_ of the new religion. The decision of the French courts in 1833, that Saint-Simonism was not a religion, and therefore that its chiefs were not priests, and entitled to a salary from the state, dispersed the new sect, and he soon after came to the United States, and commenced, though with a very imperfect knowledge of our language, and very little facility in speaking it, a course of lectures in several of our eastern cities, on Mesmerism, or, as he preferred to call it, Animal Magnetism. His appearance was by no means prepossessing, and his manners, though unpretending, were very far from indicating that exquisite grace and polish which are supposed, for what reason I know not, to be peculiar to the Frenchman; but he was a serious, earnest-minded man, who in several branches of science had made solid studies. I knew him well, and esteemed him much.