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Samuel Latham Mitchill (August 20, 1764September 7, 1831) was an American physician, naturalist, and politician who lived in Plandome, New York.〔(Details - Plantae Plandomenses; or, A catalogue of the plants growing spontaneously in the neighbourhood of Plandome, the country residence of Samuel L. Mitchill. - Biodiversity Heritage Library ) Retrieved 2014-10-07.〕 ==Life and politics== Samuel L. Mitchill was born in Hempstead, New York and graduated in 1786 from the University of Edinburgh Medical School with an M.D., an education paid for by a wealthy uncle.〔D. Graham Burnett, ''Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature'' (Princeton University Press, 2007), 45.〕 Returning to the United States after medical school, Mitchill completed law school.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=m000831 )〕 Mitchill taught chemistry, botany, and natural history at Columbia College from 1792 until 1801 and was a founding editor of ''The Medical Repository'', the first medical journal in the United States. In addition to his Columbia lectures on botany, zoology, and mineralogy, Mitchill collected, identified, and classified many plants and animals, particularly aquatic organisms. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1797.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterM.pdf )〕 From 1807 to 1826, he taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York and then helped organize the short-lived Rutgers Medical College of New Jersey, which he served as vice president until 1830. While at Columbia, Mitchill developed a fallacious theory of disease, which however resulted in his promotion of personal hygiene and improved sanitation.〔Keir B. Sterling, "Mitchill, Samuel Latham" (American National Biography Online ).〕 Mitchill served in the New York State Assembly in 1791 and again in 1798 and was then elected as a Democratic-Republican to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1801 until his resignation on November 22, 1804. In November 1804, Mitchill was elected a U.S. Senator from New York to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of John Armstrong, and served from November 23, 1804, to March 4, 1809. He then served again in the House of Representatives from December 4, 1810, to March 4, 1813. Mitchill was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.〔(American Antiquarian Society Members Directory )〕 Mitchill strongly endorsed the building of the Erie Canal, sponsored by his friend and political ally DeWitt Clinton; they were both members of the short-lived New-York Institution.〔See (Mitchill's speech at the dedication of the Erie Canal ).〕 Mitchill suggested renaming the United States of America Fredonia, combining the English "freedom" with a Latinate ending. Although the suggestion was not seriously considered, some towns adopted the name, including Fredonia, New York.〔George R. Stewart, ''Names on the Land'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) 173.〕 Some freebooters even established a short-lived republic under that name in Texas in the late 1820s. Mitchill was a man of "irrepressible energies...polyglot enthusiasms...() distinguished eccentricities" who was not "a man afraid to speak out loud about the loves of plants and animals; indeed, he was not a man afraid to speak out loud on most any topic. In the early nineteenth century, Mitchill was New York's "most publicly universal gentleman...a man known variously as the 'living encyclopedia,' as a 'stalking library,' and (to his admired Jefferson) as the 'Congressional Dictionary.'"〔Burnett, 44. In 1828, Martin Harris, an associate of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movment, visited Mitchill asking that he authenticate the "Reformed Egyptian" characters that Smith said were taken from golden plates to which he said he had been directed by an angel. Mitchill would have been unsympathetic to the view that Indians were related to the Jews or the Egyptians because he was one of the few scholars of his day who believed that Native Americans were descended from Asians. Mitchill left no record of Harris's visit. ; ; .〕 "Once described as a 'chaos of knowledge,' Mitchill was generally more admired for his encyclopedic breadth of understanding than for much originality of thought." As a personality he was affable but also egotistical and pedantic. Mitchill enjoyed popularizing scientific knowledge and promoting practical applications of scientific inquiry.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Samuel L. Mitchill」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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