 Norton acted as a foreign correspondent for "The Cultivator" and "American Agriculturalist" as he submitted monthly letters describing his observations.Norton studied chemistry under Benjamin Silliman at Yale College, and was eventually appointed professor of agricultural chemistry at Yale in 1846.He helped to found the Department of Philosophy and the Arts at Yale with Silliman's son, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., which would later become the Sheffield Scientific School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.