of a brave struggle with the poverty which had kept them from their goal." After a description of the village and the mode of life in it, Prof. Shepard continues: "With such surroundings, what now were our interior advantages? Whatever we may have represented them to outsiders, whatever we may have persuaded ourselves concerning them, they were, in my day, extremely meager. The teachers were few, and in general were not distinguished in their departments. Our library did not surpass the scholarly range of a country clergyman in fair circumstances. Apparatus and collections were unknown in our first year, and they had made but feeble beginnings before our graduation. The only lectures which I remember were the two annual courses of Prof. Amos Eaton, in his day a distinguished botanist and geologist.
"In Dr. Moore, a gentleman of suave manners, of true Christaindignity, and of singular judgment in managing youth, we had an admirable president. I venture to suspect that he was the only college president in the United States who, from the beginning, personally subscribed for the somewhat expensive numbers of the Journal of the Royal Institution of London. From this source, and others similar, he appears to have gained a prevision of the importance of the modern sciences in education, and to him mainly are we indebted for the early foothold which they gained in the institution; to him, at all events, we owed the presence of Prof. Eaton. Rarely has college lecturer been more faithfully and enthusiastically listened to than Prof. Eaton in his courses on chemistry and botany, together with his abridged course on zoölogy. To supply the place of a text-book on the last-mentioned branch, he furnished us a highly useful printed syllabus, drawn mainly from the great work of Cuvier, then wholly inaccessible to us. . . . There were doubtless deficiencies to be regretted. In the larger and older universities we might have found better teachers and richer stores of libraries and collections, but in some unknown way, perhaps in the enthusiasm of comparatively solitary effort, compensation was made; and on the whole we may doubt whether higher life success would have attended us had we launched from other ports."
For a year after graduation he studied botany and mineralogy with Thomas Nuttall at Cambridge, and during most of this time taught the same branches in Boston. His study of mineralogy led to the preparation of papers on that subject which he sent to the American Journal of Science, and in this manner he became acquainted with its editor, the elder Silliman. He was invited in 1827 to become Prof. Silliman's assistant, and continued as such till 1831. For a year of this time he was Curator of Franklin Hall, an institution that was established by James Brewster in
