92 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



for the instruction of girls. There are charming glimpses of 

 this rural life. By birth, education and choice, Benjamin and 

 his elder brother, Gold Selleck, were country boys, and adopted 

 the amusements and varieties of exercise which belong peculiarly 

 to the country. Much company resorted to Holland Hill, and 

 near by, the village of Fairfield was the home of many families 

 of refinement and influence, as the names of Thaddeus Burr, 

 Jonathan Sturges and Andrew Eliot suggest. Here a little later, 

 dwelt Roger Minot Sherman. 



The first experience of Benjamin Silliman, away from the 

 parental roof, began in New Haven, where he was admitted as 

 a student of Yale College in the autumn of 1792, then but 

 thirteen years of age, the youngest of the class save one. He 

 had been well fitted for his college course by the minister of 

 Fairfield, Rev. Andrew Eliot, who had graduated at Harvard in 

 1762. He was a thorough scholar who took delight in imparting 

 to his few pupils a love of the classics, especially of Virgil, but 

 unfortunately, his choice library had been consumed when Gen- 

 eral Tryon burnt the town of Fairfield in 1779. 



Dr. Ezra Stiles was President of the college until 1795 when 

 he was succeeded by Dr. Timothy Dwight. Silliman's remi- 

 niscences of this period give amusing illustrations of the condi- 

 tions under which students grew up at that time. 



After taking his degree, in the class of 1796, he had for the next 

 few years the experience of many college graduates, uncertainty 

 as to his future. He spent some time with his mother, looking 

 after her affairs, taught school for a while in Wethersfield, and 

 began the study of law at New Haven under the guidance of 

 Simeon Baldwin, David Daggett and Charles Chauncey, and 

 was duly admitted to the bar in 1802. While pursuing these 

 studies, he held the office of tutor in Yale College, having received 

 the appointment in 1799 when he had just reached the age of 

 twenty years. An eye-witness, 1 then a student, describes his 

 initiation into the tutorial office thus: I recall "a fair and 

 portly young man, with thick and long hair, clubbed behind, 

 i Rev. Noah Porter, D.D., of Farmington, Conn. 



