Coppee.] 1^2 [March. 



than to any other one thing, am I indebted for any success which 

 may have attended my public lectures. To the citizens of Boston, 

 Brooklyn, New York, and New Orleans, for the kindness with which 

 they were pleased to receive my imperfect efforts, I am deeply in- 

 debted. My lectures were never written, and no idea was enter- 

 tained of publishing a course, until the partiality of my friends in- 

 duced me to attempt this experiment." 



Thus it was that, in 1842, he began his remarkable career as a 

 lecturer on astronomy. More than any other man in America has 

 he thus accomplished for his favorite science. Besides the Observa- 

 tory he founded, and the instruments he imported, and to which he 

 has greatly added by his improvements and inventions, he awakened 

 in thousands of minds an interest in the subject, instructed popular 

 assemblies, not only by his clear outlines of the gigantic science, but 

 by his masterly handling of its difficult and abstruse theories and 

 problems, and by his fiery words, which exhibiting his own know- 

 ledge and enthusiasm, told of its divine beauties and relations, and 

 kept crowded audiences all over the country in breathless and de- 

 lighted attention. 



He found time to begin, in 1846, the publication of the Siderial 

 Messenger, a popular astronomical monthly, which was regularly 

 issued for more than a year. 



He had surveyed the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1844, and 

 when the enterprise was fairly undertaken, and the road placed 

 under contract, he was sent to Europe by the Company, as a confi- 

 dential agent on the business of the road, in 1853, and again on the 

 same business in 1854. For some time he was the President of the 

 Cincinnati division of that road, and was chiefly instrumental in 

 bringing it to a successful completion. 



In the summer of 1860, he was appointed Director of the Dudley 

 Observatory, and, without a reference to the unhappy difficulties 

 which beset that institution at the beginning, it may be said that his 

 acceptance of the post restored quiet, and produced the greatest use- 

 fulness of which the Observatory was instrumentally and financially 

 capable. It was still under his direction at the time of his death. 



When the war broke out, Professor Mitchel, urged singly and 

 purely by patriotic motives, placed his services at the disposition of 

 the Government, and devoted his life and military knowledge to his 

 country. On the 9th of August, 1861, he was appointed a Briga- 

 dier-General of Volunteers, and was placed in command of the De- 



