4 o 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



real measurement 6,677 feet, nearly what lie obtained (6,672 feet) 

 in 1844. Prof. Guyot, in 1856, obtained a height of 6,701 feet. 



Doubts afterward rose in Prof. Mitchell's mind whether the 

 peak he climbed in 1835 was the true summit of the mountain. 

 A new measurement of Mount Washington had been made, which 

 seemed to add to its reported height and lift it above Mitchell's 

 Peak. Dr. Mitchell revisited the mountain in 1838, and deter- 

 mined in 1844 to make a new survey and measurement. He 

 obtained a Gay Lussac mountain barometer from Paris, took 

 William Kiddle as his guide, and, making Asheville his base for 

 comparison, found the height 6,672 feet. The identity of the peak 

 visited this time was afterward called in question by other parties, 

 but Prof. Mitchell himself never doubted that he had been on the 

 right spot. He wrote in the summer of 1856, " I stood upon the 

 highest peak some days since, and could then distinguish the 

 ridges over which my guide, William Riddle, taking as nearly as 

 he could a straight, or, as it happened, a diagonal direction across 

 them from the neighborhood of the Green Ponds, led me directly 

 to the peak we were in search of." 



After the survey of 1844, the Hon. Thomas L. Clingman put 

 forth a claim to having been the first to measure the real culmi- 

 nating point of the Black Mountain, and undertook to prove that 

 Prof. Mitchell had been mistaken in the mountain which he 

 measured. The question thus raised was the subject of an active 

 controversy for several years. The highest mountain was called 

 Clingman's Peak, and Prof. Mitchell's name was transferred to 

 the peak which was described in his diary of 1835 as "a round 

 three-knobby knob, equal to the highest," which he had never as- 

 sumed to climb or to measure. It was as much to settle this dis- 

 pute as for the sake of more accurate measurement that Prof. 

 Mitchell made his fifth visit to the mountain in 1857, in which he 

 lost his life. The question was investigated by his friends after 

 his death, when all the accessible evidence was collected and com- 

 pared, and his priority in measuring the peak, and the identity of 

 the mountain he measured in 1835 with the real highest point, seem 

 to have been satisfactorily established. In evidence to support his 

 claim, Prof. Phillips brought forward the notes in his diary of 

 1835 and their exact correspondence with Prof. Guyot's profile ; 

 the testimony of William Wilson, one of the guides who went up 

 with him, and who gave in his certificate a correct description of 

 the topography of the summit, and of Nathaniel Allen, son of 

 Adoniram Allen, the other guide, deceased, who said that his 

 father had always spoken of that peak as the one which he as- 

 cended with Prof. Mitchell ; the certificate of four citizens who 

 accompanied William Wilson in September, 1857, while he re- 

 traced the steps of the ascent of 1835 ; the testimony of numerous 



