146 PITTONIA. 
the thirty-first of March, 1887, in the seventy-fourth year of 
his age; having been born at New Hartford, Connecticut, on 
the sixth of December, 1813. 
Herborizing is reported to have been a passion with him, 
almost from childhood ; and his parents, farmer people in 
comfortable circumstances, judged, agreeably to rural ideas of 
the healing art then prevalent, that training with a view to the 
medical profession was indicated for a boy whose chosen past- 
time was that of filling the farm house attic with herb bundles, 
making ita store room of simples from which, it is said, 
the neighborhood around were wont to draw freely whenever 
real or fancied remedial agents were in request. 
He does not appear to have received any literary training 
beyond that afforded by the village common schools ; but in 
early youth he was placed with an eminent physician of Mid- 
dletown, Connecticut, to begin medical studies. Pursuing 
these with commendable zeal, his health failed, and he return- 
ed to the farm, where, resuming work in the field, and recrea- 
tion in the woods, the threatenings of pulmonary disease dis- 
appeared, but to return again as often as he went back to indoor 
lifeand books ; and being advised to try, as a last hope of recov- 
` ery, the effect of a milder climate than that of New England, 
he went to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a 
student in the medical college of that city. His degree in 
medicine was taken some years subsequently, at the college in 
Lexington, Kentucky ; for he had early been compelled, by 
the return of serious pulmonary trouble, to exchange the cli- 
mate of the sea board town for that of the interior. 
He practiced his profession for a numbe 
parts of Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama, 
but what appertained to his own needs. He was careful to 
enter in his books, the account of every fee due him, and as 
careful (or careless) never to present a bill. It was the opin- 
ion of one who knew him in those days, that he did not once, 
in all his career asa physician, request a payment. Naturally, 
he failed to obtain in medicine the means of subsistence, and 
abandoned the profession. The turning point of his life, in 
r of years, in various 
with success in all 
