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402. He had already acquired a considerable knowledge of English 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 poetry. 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 entering the ministry. Dr. Dwight died within a year, and Mr. Olmsted 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 1816, 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 incompetency of schoolmasters" as the primary cause of the low condition of public schools, and appealed to public and private liberality 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 common rudimentary branches, such as English grammar, geography.