352 HORACE BIXXEY. 



1793, just after his admission to college. Left thus on the very thresh- 

 old of life, at thirteen, without father or mother to advise and direct 

 him, he gave the best possible proof of his reverence for their memory, 

 by his devotion to the opportunities of improvement which lay before 

 him. In 1797, he took his degree at the head of his class, though 

 but seventeen years old. Among his classmates were that eminent 

 scholar, the Rev. Dr. William Jenks ; Dr. John Collins Warren ; 

 Jud^e Daniel Appleton White ; Professor Asahel Stearns, the imme- 

 diate predecessor of Judge Story in the Law School of the University, 

 all of them Fellovrs of the Academy ; and Chief Justice William 

 Merchant Richardson, of New Hampshire. Mr. Binney bore this 

 testimony, long afterwards, to the advantages he had derived from 

 his academic education : " The unfading art which I acquired at col- 

 lege was that of study ; and, if the acquisitions I then made are faded 

 or fallen from the surface, the art or faculty of study has never left 

 me." A just recognition of the truth that the function of a Univer- 

 sity is to train, even more than to store, the young mind. 



When young Binney first began to consider what should be the 

 serious business of his life, it is not surprising that he should liave 

 first inclined towards the profession of medicine. His father and his 

 step-father having been both of them in that line of life, his thoughts 

 naturally turned themselves in that direction. Dr. Spring, however, 

 discouraged this inclination ; and he applied for admission to the 

 counting-house of an eminent firm of merchants in Philadelphia, with 

 the idea of devoting himself to trade. Fortunately for his future, 

 there was no room for him there ; and, as a last resort, he turned to tlie 

 law, and entered the office of Jared Ingersoll, an eminent lawyer of 

 that day. Having once made his choice of the law as the business of 

 his life, he applied the whole force of his mind, with all the power 

 of application his previous discipline had given it, to mastering the 

 science and learning the methods of its reduction to the business of 

 life. His devotion to that jealous mistress was absolute ; and he 

 allowed himself to be diverted from it by none of the seductions of 

 pleasure or of society. In 1800, when but a little past his twentieth 

 year, he was admitted to the bar, and entered upon that probationary 

 novitiate through which all young lawyers have to pass. The 

 enforced leisure of waiting, however, was sedulously improved by 

 continued study and regular attendance ujjon the courts, to fit him 

 for the success which awaited him. 



That success was not very long delayed. We have no room within 

 the limits permitted us here to go into the particulars of his beginnings 



