inquiries. Curious speculations and remarks appear in his letters about phenomena which came under his observation. In one letter, Dr. Mitchill wishes his wife to inform him exactly at what hour a certain storm began. "I wish to know" he said, "exactly when the storm began in New York, as it is connected with other facts tending to a theory of the atmospheric motions in winter." Another letter, forwarding a specimen of the Mitchella repens, explains why no plant had been named after him. Prof. Willdenow, of Berlin, had intended to give his name to some plant, but found it already appropriated by this partridge-berry, which was named by Linnæus in honor of John Mitchell, of Virginia. He was more fortunate, according to Dr. Francis, in the matter of fish. "He was the delight," says this biographer, "of a meeting of naturalists. The seed he sowed gave origin and growth to a mighty crop of those disciples of natural science. He was emphatically our great living ichthyologist. The fishermen and fish-mongers were perpetually bringing him new specimens. They adopted his name for our excellent fish, the striped bass, and designated it the Perca Mitchilli."
He writes concerning a conversation he had with Captain Lewis, the explorer, about the burning plains up the Missouri, where the burning strata of coal underlying the plains produced such intense heat as to form lava, slag, and pumice-stone by the same process that forms those volcanic substances in the burning mountains of other countries. December 30, 1807, he congratulates his wife on the account in one of her letters of the meteoric stones that fell to the earth in Connecticut, which arrived at a most convenient time, having preceded all the letters to the Connecticut delegation, and even outrun the newspapers. Dr. Mitchill also during this period visited Upper Canada, and described the mineralogy of Niagara Falls; wrote a history of West Point and the Military Academy; and visited Harper's Ferry and described the geology and scenery of that spot, which had been eulogized for its sublimity by Jefferson' in his Notes on Virginia. Dr. Mitchill retired from his professorship in Columbia College on his election to Congress, in 1801. In 1807, when the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the City of New York was organized, he was chosen its first Professor of Chemistry, but declined the position, preferring his public duties. In 1808, however, he accepted a professorship of Natural History; and in 1820, on the reorganization of the faculty, became Professor of Botany and Materia Medica. Difficulties occurred with the Board of Trustees in 1828, and the whole faculty of the college resigned. Among other works for the advancement of science and learning mentioned in his record are his action with Drs. Hosack and Hugh Williamson in laying the foundation of a Literary and Philosophical Society
