PROCEEDINGS OF THE OHIO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 181 



He was by birth and sympathy distinctly a western man, 

 and was inclined to resent the generally assumed and accepted 

 superiority of the East in matters relating to literature and 

 science. When, after a brilliant success with his course of 

 lectures on astronomy in New Haven, he went to Boston, it 

 was with keen delight that he saw, on entering the large audi- 

 torium for his first appearance there, that every seat was occu- 

 pied and "standing room at a premium." His pleasure was 

 greatly enhanced when he recognized in his audience Professors 

 Bond and Peirce, of Harvard University, the most eminent of 

 American astronomers of that day, who had declared to be 

 absurd and preposterous Mitchell's claim that the precise mo- 

 ment of the transit of a star could be determined by the "Cin- 

 cinnati Method" to within one one-hundredth of a second. After- 

 wards he was fond of relating how at the close of the lecture 

 in which he had described and illustrated this method, when a 

 storm of applause burst from the audience, he saw the two 

 Harvard skeptics "standing upon their chairs and clapping for 

 dear life !" "It was", he said, "the supreme moment of my 

 existence." 



Mitchell served as director of the Cincinnati observatory, 

 without compensation, for a period of ten years, during which 

 he made many important contributions to astronomical science, 

 especially regarding double stars, nebulae, sun spots and comets, 

 for the study of which the great equatorial was particularly fitted. 

 His more important work included also the invention of an 

 instrument for measuring personal equation and a telegraph 

 determination of the longitude of Cincinnati and of St. Louis, 

 as related to Washington. He was a member of scientific socie- 

 ties in this country and in Europe and the author of several 

 books on astronomy, one of which, the "Planetary and Stellar 

 Worlds" should be read by every lover of that science. On 

 the firing of the first gun of the civil war, in 1861. Mitchell 

 immediately offered his services to the national government and 

 vvas made Brigadier General of Ohio volunteers. His career 

 ^s an army officer was brief but brilliant. He greatly dis- 

 tinguished himself in a famous xaid into the country of the 

 enemy, during which he seized and held possession of the rail- 



