In college his marks in Philosophy were low: he knew more than his teachers did, and differed with them, and probably with his textbooks. He was threatened with expulsion from college for disseminating among the students seditious ideas, including the doctrine of Evolution. Eight years later he was invited to expound the same ideas in a course of lectures in one of the chapels of the university. A third instance of the revolution in opinion which marked the last century was the refusal, in 1872, because of Fiske's unorthodoxy, to invite him to lecture at the Lowell Institute, which was followed less than twenty years later by invitations to do it. Then the demand for seats was so great that the evening lectures had to be repeated in subsequent afternoons. After graduation, Fiske studied law, did two years' work in nine months, passed a triumphant examination, and was admitted to the Bar. But after waiting for clients two years, during which he read more, in quantity and quality, than most fairly studious men read in a lifetime, and wrote several notable essays, he gave up law for the pursuits in which he was already eminent. But though he gave up the law, nearly eighteen years later he could write thus to his wife (_Life and Letters_, II, p. 205): "Judge Gantt thought he would stick me, and so propounded to me the barbarous law-Latin puzzle propounded by Sir Thomas More to a learned jurist at Amsterdam, 'whether a plough taken _in withernam_ can be replevied?' Didn't stick Hezekiah [The author does not give us the origin of this nickname] _not much_. I gave him a minute account of the ancient process of distraining and impounding and of the action of replevin,--considerably to my own amusement and his astonishment."