Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/716

698 captivating by his endeavors to improve the nomenclature of the French savants, and to render the science subservient to the useful purposes of agriculture, art, and hygiene. In treating of the materia medica he delighted to dwell on the riches of our native products for the art of healing, and he sustained an enormous correspondence throughout the land, in order to add to his own practical observations the experience of the competent, the better to prefer the claims of our indigenous products.

Many of Dr. Mitchill's scientific papers were published in the London Philosophical Magazine, New York Medical Repository, American Medical and Philosophical Register, New York Medical and Physical Journal, American Mineralogical Journal, and Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia; and he supplied several other periodicals, both abroad and at home, with the results of his cogitations.

Dr. Mitchill was the author of a few verses, and of prose essays or addresses of an order of humorous trifling, much affected at the time, of which the lighter works of Irving and Paulding furnish the most conspicuous examples, and with which Halleck's verses are in sympathy. One of his favorite topics was a proposition to give a new name—Fredon, or Fredonia—to the United States, after which the people should be called Fredes or Fredonians, and their relations Fredish or Fredonian. The subject was taken up and discussed in the New York Historical Society, but has long since been forgotten.

His social and domestic character, according to the writer in Harper's Magazine, was unusually amiable and attractive, and marked by many amusing peculiarities. He had great fondness for young people, and a rare power of inspiring them with the love of knowledge. His home was pleasant and unpretending, "and the numerous celebrities who used to resort to his salon were entertained with cordial but simple hospitality." His house was a perfect museum of curiosities, and Mrs. Mitchill used to be troubled by the disorder they occasioned. As pertinent to this nuisance, the story of the ant-eater's skin was told.. At first the skin was an object of great interest. Then it became dingy and dusty, and was remanded to the garret. In two or three years more it became old and moth-eaten, and Mrs. Mitchill and the servant, not wishing to worry the doctor, had it secretly carried off and thrown into the street. Dr. Mitchill, taking his regular walk the next morning, came upon a group of boys curiously looking at some unusual object, which proved to be the ant-eater's skin. He joined them, and, after giving them a full scientific lecture on the ant-eater, said he had a skin like this one at home and would bo glad to have another—and bought it from them for fifty cents. No further attempts were made to get rid of it.