ducation, as a collegiate course of studies is at present,
and in many instances most absurdly, called. Morton could, however, lay
a just claim to be called liberally educated. He went to college without
contemplating to pursue either of the three learned professions, but
merely to acquire a more intimate acquaintance with the classics,
history, belles lettres, and mathematics, than it was then supposed he
could obtain elsewhere. People begin to think differently at the present
period, and have a faint sort of notion that a boy can become qualified
for the every day duties of life, or for practice in the three
professions, without having received a diploma from a college,
exclusively controlled in all its attitudes and relations by one
particular sect of religion, or passing four years of "toil and trouble"
in another university, where he is kept wallowing and smothering in the
darkness of metaphysics or the more abstruse and _higher_! branches of
mathematics; both sciences as utterly useless to him in any situation of
life as a knowledge of the precise language that the devil tempted Eve
in, and which some ecclesiastical writers have laboured to prove was
High Dutch. I have been several times to different parts of the East
Indies, and on more than one voyage have kept a reckoning out and home,
assisted in taking lunar observations and those for determining the time
and variation of the compass, and without knowing any more of algebra,
fluxions, or conic sections, than a dog knows about his father.

After Morton had had the sacred A. B. "tailed on" to his name at a grand
sanhedrim of solemn blacked-gowned fools, sagely called a
_commencement_, because a youngster there _finishes_ his studies, he
felt a strong desire to visit "the round world and them that dwell
therein," and, like many New England youth, not only then but within my
own observation and time, and before the signature of the august
"praeses" was dry on his sheep-skin diploma, was entered as an under
graduate in a college of a somewhat different description--the
forecastle of a large brig bound on a trading voyage up the
Mediterranean--a school not one whit inferior to old Harvard itself for
morality, and one where a man, with his eyes and ears open, might
acquire information fifty times more valuable than any that could be
drilled into him at any learned seminary whatever--a knowledge, namely,
of the world and of human nature.

This habit, if it can be ca