402 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion. He had already acquired a considerable knowledge of Eng- 

 lish literature, and made creditable progress in the elementary 

 mathematics. With the consent of his guardian and his mother 

 he went to Litchfield South Farms, to attend the school of James 

 Morris. He undertook the care of a public district school for a 

 short time ; completed his fitting for college under the Rev. Dr. 

 Noah Porter at Farmington, and entered Yale College in 1809. 

 He took rank at once among the best scholars in his class, being 

 apparently nearly equally proficient in all his studies, excelling 

 also in writing, and cultivating a taste for belles-lettres and 

 poetrj'-. He was graduated with the highest honors in 1813, when 

 he was appointed one of the orators in a class of seventy, of which 

 only ten received that distinction. The subject of his graduation 

 address was The Causes of Intellectual Greatness. 



After graduation, Mr. Olmsted obtained a position as a teacher 

 in the " Union School " at New London, Conn., a private institution 

 for boys which had been supported by a few families of the place 

 for several generations. In 1815 he was appointed a tutor in Yale 

 College. Here he joined a small class in theology, instructed by 

 Dr. D wight, with the intention, which he had formed a short time 

 before having come under strong religious influence of enter- 

 ing the ministry. Dr. Dwight died within a year, and Mr. Olm- 

 sted published a memoir of him in The Portfolio for November, 

 1817. The theological studies were terminated in 1817 by Mr. 

 Olmsted's appointment to be Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy, 

 and Geology in the University of North Carolina. 



During his tutorship at Yale in 181G, Mr. Olmsted delivered 

 the Master's Oration on the occasion of taking his second degree, 

 taking as his subject The State of Education in Connecticut. In 

 this oration he brought out his plan for a normal school, which, 

 so far as appears, was then a complete novelty, and was wholly 

 original with him. He pointed to " the ignorance and incom- 

 petency of schoolmasters " as the primary cause of the low con- 

 dition of public schools, and appealed to public and private liber- 

 ality to establish and support institutions of a higher grade, 

 where a better class of teachers might be trained for the lower 

 schools. He has himself, in one of his letters, given an account 

 of the origin of his conception of this scheme of " a school for 

 schoolmasters." It was while engaged in the Union School at 

 New London, where he had pupils of various ages pursuing a 

 great variety of studies ; so that, while the number of pupils was 

 small, the classes were many. He discovered, he related, a marked 

 difference in intelligence and capacity between those who were 

 studying the languages and mathematics, preparatory to entering 

 college, and who devoted only a small part of the day to the com- 

 mon rudimentary branches, such as English grammar, geography. 



