398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that it soon wears away under much traffic. Figure-pictures, for 

 a floor to be walked on, are a mistake, though they may be used 

 as a center-piece to be looked at from above, and be surrounded 

 by plants or flowers ; but nothing can be more appropriate for 

 internal wall decoration than figure-subjects, or floral ornament 

 in marble or tile mosaic ; in either case it is permanent, and can 

 be easily cleaned, and that in marble, at least, must be low in 

 tone, for it can have but two colors of complete purity, white and 

 black. 



England has got rich these last sixty years by flooding the 

 world with rubbish, so nothing can be more patriotic than having 

 a piece of the best workmanship you can obtain put in your 

 house, and by that I mean attached to the freehold, if it be your 

 own, and let this piece be adorned by the hand of an artist, for 

 his workmanship is transcendental, and, if possible, let it portray 

 a noble example, or evoke a noble reminiscence, and be of such 

 materials that it can not well be sold or destroyed for the value 

 of the material. 



SKETCH OF ELISHA MITCHELL. 



A MONUMENT of modest size and style, standing, in Yancey 

 County, North Carolina, on the highest point of land in the 

 eastern United States, marks the grave of the man who first de- 

 termined, by measurement, the culminating point of the Appala- 

 chian range a man, too, whose local fame as a student of natural 

 history, a hardy explorer, and a teacher, was pre-eminent. Not 

 the little obelisk of bronze that only shows the exact spot where 

 his body lies but the mountain on which it stands, whose su- 

 premacy over all the peaks east of the Rocky Mountains he estab- 

 lished, and in the exploration of which he lost his life, is the true 

 monument of Prof. Elisha Mitchell. 



Elisha Mitchell was born in Washington, Conn., August 19, 

 1703. His father, Abner Mitchell, was a farmer; and his mother, 

 Phebe Eliot, was a descendant, in the fifth generation, from John 

 Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians. His great-grandfather, the 

 Rev. Jared Eliot, M. D. and D. D., for many years minister at Kil- 

 lingworth, Conn., was distinguished for his knowledge of history, 

 natural philosophy, botany, and mineralogy, no less than as a 

 sturdily orthodox theologian ; was a correspondent of Dr. Frank- 

 lin and Bishop Berkeley, and was awarded a gold medal by the 

 Royal Society for a discovery in the manufacture of iron. Young 

 Mitchell inherited many of the qualities of the Eliots, and par- 

 ticularly of this ancestor. At four years of age he acquitted him- 

 self with credit in a school exhibition. At a little later age he 



