10 JOURNAL OF TITP: 



delightful to all men of taste and learning. To say that he was a 

 marked man in the class of 1813. a class thai contained Dr. Olmsted 

 of Yale College, President Longstreet of Georgia, and Mr. Thomas 

 P. Devereux, the Rev. Mr. Singeltary and Judge Badger of North 

 Carolina, is to say that his honors bore the signs of a vigorous and 

 well contested race. The last year of his course at Yale College was 

 ever memorable to him, because in it he joined the Church of his 

 fathers. The determination to do so was formed by the earnest and 

 gentle persuasion of a class-mate, a man by no means his equal in 

 the grasp or activity of his mental powers. So it was all through 

 his life. He who was often hard to move by argument, and gener- 

 ally firmly fixed in the face of opposition, yielded a ready acquies- 

 cence to truth addressed to his heart. He often gave what no man 

 could take from him. 



Dr. Mitchell began his life long work of teaching, immediately 

 after graduating, by becoming an usher in the school of the Rev. 

 Dr. Eigenbrodt, a notable pedagogue of Jamaica, L. I. In the 

 spring of 1815, he took charge of a seminary for girls in New Lon- 

 don, Conn. There again, while busy with the head, he became in- 

 terested in the affairs of the heart. His love for Nature found sat- 

 isfaction in visiting the library and enjoying the conversation of 

 Dr. North, who had a great name as a Physician and as a ^^hysicist. 

 In Dr. North's family he also found, in the person of his daughter, 

 the wife who, from 1819 until he died, made his home delightful to 

 him by the wisdom, dignity, intelligence and charity with which she 

 presided over their household. A nephew of Mrs. Mitchell, Dr. H. 

 Carrington Bolton, is now sustaining his grand-father's reputation 

 as the Professor of Chemistry in Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., 

 and so adds another to the group of scientific men with whom Dr. 

 Mitchell must be associated. 



In 1816 Dr. Mitchell became a tutor in Yale College. AVhile thus 

 beginning to increase the fame and power of his Alma Mater he 

 attracted the attention of the Rev. Sereno Dwight, at that time 

 Chaplain of the Senate of the U. S. Mr. Dwight mentioned him, 

 with Dr. Olmsted, to Judge Gaston, then a member of the House of 

 Representatives, as two young men likely to become prominent Scien- 

 tists. The Trustees of this University were, at that time, looking 

 for men fit to fill the chairs of Mathematics and of Chemistry which 

 they had lately established here. On the recommendation of Judge 

 (iaston. Dr. Olmsted was chosen Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy 

 and Geology— while to Dr. Mitchell was assigned the Professorship 

 of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Dr. Mitchell did not 



