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 856 MOSAIC of Boston in assigning the merit of the dis- covery to Dr. Morton. In 1858 a similar ap- peal was made in New York, signed by the principal medical men of that city, and in 1860 also in Philadelphia. In 1858 he instituted a suit against a marine hospital surgeon for in- fringing his patent, as suggested by the presi- dent, which was decided in his favor in the United States circuit court. In the last years of his life he was engaged in agricultural pur- suits, especially in the importation and raising of fine cattle at his farm in Wellesley, Mass. His death was caused by the excitement occa- sioned by an article attempting to deprive him of the honor of being -the discoverer of anass- thesia ; this attack brought on a fatal conges- tion and syncope. A monument in Mt. Au- burn was erected by citizens of Boston, with the following inscription, written by Dr. Jacob Bigelow : " Wm. T. G. Morton, inventor and revealer of anesthetic inhalation; by whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, in all time, surgery was agony ; since whom science has control of pain." The Montyon prize medal, his orders received from Russia and Sweden, and the silver box pre- sented in Boston, are deposited in the rooms of the Massachusetts historical society, Bos- ton. (See ANAESTHETICS, JACKSON, CHARLES THOMAS, and WELLS, HORACE.) See "Trials of a Public Benefactor," by Dr. Nathan P. Rice (New York, 1859). MOSAIC (late Gr. //owreZof, belonging to the muses, polished, elegant, or well wrought), the representation of a design by fitting to- gether on a ground of cement numerous small pieces of stone and glass, of various colors, and generally cubical. Although one of the most mechanical of the fine arts, it is en- titled to rank as a style of painting, from the fact that it requires the preparation of a car- toon or colored design, as in the case of a fresco or an elaborate oil picture, and no in- considerable knowledge of form, color, and composition. Dating from a remote period, it has been transmitted to the present time, and in modern Italy has been carried to a higher degree of perfection than it attained at periods when it was almost the only species of picto- rial art in vogue. Of the mechanical process employed, the following description of the practice in the establishment at the Vatican in Rome will convey an adequate idea : " The slab upon which the mosaic is made is gener- ally of Travertine or Tibertine stone. In this the workman cuts a certain space, which he encircles with bands or cramps of iron. Upon this hollowed surface mastic or cementing paste is gradually spread as the progress of the work requires it, thus forming the adhesive ground or bed on which the mosaic is laid. The mastic is composed of calcined marble and finely powdered Travertine stone, mixed to the consistence of paste with linseed oil. Into this paste are stuck the smalti or small cubes of colored glass which compose the picture, in the same mariner as were the colored glass, stone, and marble sectilia and tesserce of the ancients. The smalti are vitrified but opaque, partaking of the nature of stone and glass, or enamels, and are composed of a variety of minerals and materials, colored for the most part with different metallic oxides. They are manufactured in Rome in the form of long, slender rods, like wires, of different degrees of thickness, and are cut into pieces of the requi- site sizes, from the smallest pin point to an inch. When the mastic has sufficiently indu- rated (and it acquires in time the hardness of stone), the work is susceptible of a polish like crystal. Care must be taken, however, that by too high a polish the entire effect of the work is not injured, as innumerable reflected lights in that case would glitter in every part of the picture. When the design is to be seen at a very considerable distance, as in cupolas or flat ceilings, the work is generally less elaborately polished, as the inequalities of the surface are then less distinguishable, and the interstices of the work cannot be detected by the specta- tor." By this process many copies of large pictures by Raphael, Domenichino, and other old masters in the Vatican have been execu- ted, occupying periods of from 12 to 20 years, and requiring from 10,000 to 15,000 different shades of the primary colors for the purposes of the work. In 1853 Pope Pius IX. sent to the crystal palace exhibition of New York a mosaic copy of Guercino's u St. John the Bap- tist," valued at $60,000, which at a short dis- tance it was impossible to distinguish from a highly finished oil painting. This, however, was a work of small importance in comparison with others preserved in the cathedrals of Eu- rope. Two other species of mosaic work are carried on in Tuscany (whence the name, Flor- entine mosaics), the pietre dure and pietre commesse, both of which are employed for or- namental purposes, and represent fruit, flow- ers, birds, &c. The former gives the objects depicted in relief in colored stones. The lat- ter consists of precious stones, as agates, jas- pers, lapis lazuli, &c., cut into thin veneer and carefully inlaid. The employment of mosaics, which have always possessed a certain value, as well from their imperishable nature as from their intrinsic merits as works of art, origina- ted probably among those eastern nations by whom so many of the arts have been transmit- ted to Europe. The Romans acquired a knowl- edge of the process from the Greeks, who had borrowed it from the Asiatics ; and by all of them it was originally applied as an ornament for pavements, the close imitation of inanimate objects scattered apparently over the floor be- ing the chief aim of the artist. Large histor- ical compositions, of which the mosaic repre- senting the battle of Issus from the casa del Fauno in Pompeii affords a felicitous exam- ple, succeeded ; and under the first Roman em- perors the art attained a considerable degree of refinement, though still used chiefly as an