witnessing the release of
Lafayette from Olmutz prison, and finally assisting the young and
melancholy, but gentle and unassuming Duke of Orleans, afterward King
of France, to find a temporary asylum in the United States. He
returned to America ten years after he had sailed from the Delaware
capes, just in time to be called to the United States Senate.]

Into the life of Jay's peaceful administration came another
interesting character, the champion of every project known to the
inventive genius of his day. We shall hear much of Samuel Latham
Mitchill during the next three decades. He was now thirty-five years
old, a sort of universal eccentric genius, already known as
philosopher, scientist, teacher, and critic, a professor in Columbia,
the friend of Joseph Priestley, the author of scientific essays, and
the first in America to make mineralogical explorations. Perhaps if
he had worked in fewer fields he might have won greater renown, making
his name familiar to the general student of our own time; but he
belonged to an order of intellect far higher than most of his
associates, filling the books with his doings and sayings. Although
his influence, even among specialists, has probably faded now, he
inspired the scientific thought of his time, and established societies
which still exist, and whose history, up to the time of his death in
1831, was largely his own. Mitchill belonged to the Republican party
because it was the party of Jefferson, and he followed Jefferson
because Jefferson was a philosopher. For the same reason he became the
personal friend of Chancellor Livingston, with whom, among other
things, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture,
Manufactures, and the Useful Arts. It was said of Mitchill that "he
was equally at home in studying the geology of Niagara, or the anatomy
of an egg; in offering suggestions as to the angle of a windmill, or
the shape of a gridiron; in deciphering a Babylonian brick, or in
advising how to apply steam to navigation."

Mitchill became a member of the Assembly in 1798, and it was his
interest in the experiments then being made of applying steam to
navigation, that led him to introduce a bill repealing the act of
1787, giving John Fitch the sole right to use steamboats on the
Hudson, and granting the privilege to Chancellor Livingston for a term
of twenty years, provided that within a year he should build a boat of
twenty tons capacity and propel it by steam at a